As part of the Fibersort project, a facility in Dutch Wormerveer now can create recycled raw material for the textile industries. The project and the new tech bring closed-loop textiles one step closer to reality.

The Fibersort project uses a technology able to automatically sort large volumes of mixed post-consumer textiles based on fibre composition. The sorted material is perfectly suited to become inputs for textile recycling processes, and commercialisation of the Fibersort will bring closed-loop textiles one step closer to reality.

Ground-breaking facility
Textiles2Textiles (and its founder Wieland Textiles) is based in the Netherlands. They use technological innovations to literally reuse every garment and its fibres. Their main product is PCC (Post Consumer Clippings). With the Fibersort machine they sort through different kind of fibres and colours. They use the concept of Fiber Farm, referring to their innovative textile recycling centre.

Reducing impact and creating recourses
As part of the The Fibersort Project, Textiles2Textiles addresses two main challenges.

• The environmental need to reduce the impact of virgin textile materials.
• The development of new business models and open markets for the growing amounts of recyclable textiles in North-West Europe (NWE).

To enable this shift, the Fibersort technology seek to create the new industry standard, adding key values when enabling high value textile-to-textile recycling in the northwest Europe region.
While the Textiles2Textiles vision was born in the Netherlands, their quest extends far beyond. This is because they have developed a unique physical and digital infrastructure, that can be replicated in Fiber Farm textile recycling centres worldwide.

The company mission stems from their founders: sorting company Wieland Textiles and supply chain software developer Retail Experts.

• The classification of fibres based on the technology they have developed makes possible to increase both the volumes, and the quality of recycled fibres. This partly because they can group the products by composition and colour.
• They are also developing an automatic disassembling machine.

Another interesting recycling project
There is another interesting project, also doing textile fibre recycling – Swedish Renewcell. If you click here, you can read an interesting article about Renewcell.

See the video on the Fibersort project (click here)
Join the project programme/signup.

The ACTE White paper on Textile Waste Management: download it here.
Sources for this text.