The opening day of ITMA 2023 was extremely hectic, with many events highlighting ongoing moves in the direction of a more sustainable and circular textile industry.
Major announcements made during the morning’s official ITMA press conference included news of future ITMA shows in Singapore in 2025 and Germany in 2027, with confirmation that here in Milan, some 1,709 exhibitors from 47 countries are present.
The European Union’s Strategy for Textiles is calling for all textile products on the EU market to be durable, repairable and recyclable – and largely made of recycled fibres – by 2030. This is notably leading to the establishment of many important new supply chain partnerships.
Textile and nonwovens technology leader Andritz, for example, has entered into a partnership with French companies Pellenc ST and Synergies TLC to set up a new industrial-scale business combining automated sorting and fibre recycling technology.
The new business, Nouvelles Fibres Textiles, will establish post-consumer textile value chains from sorting to manufacturing. Its new textile sorting line will combine Pellenc ST’s automated sorting technologies with Andritz recycling technology.
“This new company will process post-consumer textile waste to produce recycled fibres engineered for the spinning, nonwovens and composites industries,” said Andritz vice-president Tobias Schäfer. “Starting operations soon, it will serve as a production line for Nouvelles Fibres Textiles, as an R&D line for the three partners, and as a test and demonstration centre for customers.”
The accurate and highly automated sorting of waste garments has been identified as a major bottleneck in accelerating the recycling of textiles, which makes the debut of Spain’s Wastex at ITMA 2023 timely – the new company has been formed to provide the physical and digital infrastructure for accurate garment sorting in textile recycling centres worldwide.
A joint venture between two Barcelona-based companies, Coleo, a textile manufacturing company specialising in recycled fibres, and Picvisa, a technology firm supplying sorting machines, Wastex focuses on streamlining textile waste sorting for reuse, recycling and upcycling.
This is enabled by the cutting-edge Ecosort Textil system, which uses a combination of NIR (near-infrared) and RGB cameras, as well as AI technology, to efficiently sort textiles – with up to 24 separate outputs –and provide high-quality recycled yarn feedstock for the textile manufacturing industry.
“Wastex offers various automated sorting solutions for different stages in the textile recycling process, such as removing contaminants, separating reusable textiles, categorising materials by composition and colour, and preparing materials for recycling,” said the company’s co-founder Silvia Gregorini. “Central to our strategy is the Coleo Network – a collaborative platform that enables partners to access guaranteed sales of recycled materials.”
