Analysis of European post-consumer textile waste for automated sorting

The textile industry is linked to several major environmental problems, as a consequence there is an interest at European level to reduce the impact of the industry. In Sweden there are several initiatives to increase the circularity of textile for example by promoting fibre-to-fibre textile recycling. To facilitate this type of recycling the SIPTex project was created to build an industrial automatic textile sorting facility able to offer the high-quality sorted fractions required for fibre-to-fibre recycling. This study developed a quantitative analysis to assess the composition of 1.5 tons of post-consumer textile. The results showed that 52% of the analysed material were high-quality fibre garments - mainly cotton,19% lower quality fibre blends and 28%, uncategorizable garments and items not suited for the sorting facility- as shoes or oversized pieces-. The results will contribute to optimize the material inbound in the SIPTex