Textile Recycling is among the most demanding sustainability challenges and greenhouse gas emission concerns in Europe and worldwide. Within the EU, according to The 2024 Circularity Report, textiles rank among the top three contributors to environmental degradation and climate change. As production and consumption of textile products continue to grow, so does the impact on climate, water, energy consumption and the environment overall – global textile production doubled between 2000 and 2015, whereas consumption is expected to increase by 63 % by 2030. About 5.8 million tonnes of textiles are discarded every year in the EU, with about 16 kg coming from each and every European citizen per year.

Recycling constitutes a key solution to this issue, as it reduces the demand for primary, raw resources and mitigates the loss of value in waste management. Recycling, however, requires materials to be pre-sorted. Despite the already utilized sophisticated sensors and machinery, manual sorting by human employees is still an integral part of textile waste sorting, mainly to achieve the high levels of purity required by recycling plants to produce high-quality recyclate materials.

With TextileCycle, we aim to capitalize on the automated sorting of textile waste without human-in-the-loop, by introducing a seamless identity management for textiles, based on (i) unique identifiers woven into the fabric of textiles (fibre coding), the (ii) linking of these identifiers to digital product passport (DPP) data repositories, and (iii) making DPP data accessible throughout the whole product life cycle, especially to automate a 100% material conforming textile waste sorting process.

TextileCycle introduces an absolute novelty to the identity management of textiles in such a way, that no embedding (conductive material, resistors, transducers), no tagging (RFID, NFC), and no labelling (QR-Code) is involved, which causes extensive recycling issues itself. Instead, the pure structuring of the textile fibre is giving the identity, thus causing zero additional recycling. The identity is publicized upon fibre production, and made accessible to the whole product life cycle via an instance of the European DPP, the Textile Product Passport.
Aside the technological innovation, there is a clear benefit in TextileCycle as a highly promising attempt to address the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, which aims to transition the textile sector to a sustainable and circular model by 2030: “By 2030 textile products placed on the EU market are long-lived and recyclable, to a great extent made of recycled fibres, …”.