Textile recycling – the underestimated potential for mechanical and plant engineering

Fast fashion as disposable goods? What was once expensive is now available in abundance. Every second, a lorry full of clothing ends up in a landfill somewhere in the world. The wardrobe as a consumer outlet has created an ecological imbalance whose dimensions surprise even many industry experts – and whose solution holds astonishing potential. Not least for mechanical and plant engineers.

Written by Armin Scheuermann

Convoy of lorries loaded with old clothes stretching around the globe — Around 100 million tonnes of textiles are thrown away every year worldwide. If this amount were loaded onto lorries and lined up end to end, the resulting convoy would stretch over 120,000 kilometres.

The figures are staggering: around 100 million tonnes of textiles are thrown away worldwide every year. If this amount were loaded onto lorries and lined up end to end, the resulting convoy would stretch over 120,000 kilometres – three times around the earth. In the EU alone, around 12.6 million tonnes of old textiles are generated annually, 1.3 million tonnes of which are in Germany. Although the collection rate in this country is around 64%, only about a quarter of this is actually recycled.

What happens to the rest? Some of the collected textiles are reused as second-hand goods, often exported abroad. Others end up being downcycled – they are processed into cleaning rags, insulation materials or geotextiles. However, a significant proportion is thermally recycled, i.e. incinerated. The reasons for this are a lack of purity, contamination or economic factors. Genuine fibre-to-fibre recycling is still the exception: less than one per cent of the clothing discarded worldwide is actually recycled into new clothing.

A look at a neighbouring field shows what is possible: in paper recycling, the EU recycling rate is around 80%. Machine and plant manufacturers such as Andritz, Voith and Valmet have long since turned the obligation to recycle paper into a technological feat: with finely tuned processes from sorting and pulping to pulp production. The same expertise could now be applied to the textile sector.

Regulatory wake-up call: the EU is applying pressure

The European Commission has recognised the issue and is pushing for a transformation of the textile industry. The ‘EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles’ (2022) defines an ambitious roadmap for 2030:

Separate collection of old textiles will be mandatory from 1 January 2025;
From 2027, extended producer responsibility (EPR) will come into force with recycling fees of between 1 and 6 pence per garment (EU estimate up to 12 pence per garment);
By 2030, 50% of all used textiles are to be recycled.

And the clincher, which could become a massive disposal problem: export bans are planned for unsorted textile waste.
The European vision: every textile product should be durable, repairable, recyclable and traceable. Fast fashion should be curbed and the circular economy rewarded.

Technology: where paper is today, textiles could be tomorrow

As with paper recycling, success in textile recycling is a question of the process chain – and technology. The following are crucial:

Sorting: Automated sorting solutions with NIR technology (e.g. from Tomra, Fibersort) enable precise fractionation according to fibre type, colour and material composition. Capacities currently stand at up to 2 tonnes per hour – a bottleneck when billions of garments are generated.
Mechanical recycling: The established process is similar to ‘shredding’ in paper recycling. Here, textiles are processed into fibres that can be used to produce non-woven fabrics or new yarns. Ideal for pure cotton or polyester. There are limitations with mixed textiles and fibre quality.
Chemical recycling: Still in the pilot phase, but with great potential: the separation of polycotton compounds or the recovery of cellulose (similar to pulp production in the paper industry) promises genuine material recycling at fibre level.

Some start-ups (e.g. Infinited Fiber, Circ) and established companies (such as Lenzing with Refibra) are working on scalable solutions. The first plants are planned – in France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, among other places.

Exhibitors at POWTECH TECHNOPHARM surrounded by pipes — Compared to paper, textile recycling is still in its infancy – and opens up enormous opportunities for exhibitors at POWTECH TECHNOPHARM.

A billion-pound market in the making

The global market for textile recycling machines is estimated to be worth £6.5 billion by 2035, with annual growth of 4 to 6 per cent. In Europe alone, around €6 billion is expected to be invested in fibre-to-fibre infrastructure by 2030. The market potential for recyclable used textiles is €20 to €30 billion if the existing 10 million tonnes of available waste were to be used efficiently.

What does this mean for mechanical and plant engineering?

For mechanical and plant engineers, the topic of textile recycling opens up a new, growing field of business – comparable to the development of paper recycling in the 1980s. The requirements for process accuracy, material separation, energy efficiency and scalability are similarly high. And here, too, it is clear that those who understand the recycling process holistically – from sorting and shredding to the recovery of usable fibres – will play a central role in the textile circular economy in the future.

Numerous European companies are already demonstrating how much innovative power there is in the market. Austrian plant manufacturer Andritz, for example, is considered a global technology leader – not least because it is the only supplier to date to cover all process steps: from sorting to mechanical and chemical recycling. With its Recycling Technology Centre in Austria and successful reference projects such as France's first industrial textile sorting plant at Nouvelles Fibres Textiles (2024), Andritz is demonstrating what is already technologically possible.

Tomra from Norway is also showing where the journey can take us: in Malmö, the world's first fully automatic sorting plant for used textiles was built in 2021 in collaboration with the plant engineering company Stadler. At its heart is Tomra's Autosort system with NIR/VIS technology, which analyses and separates mixed post-consumer textiles in a matter of seconds – a milestone for industrial sorting.

In the field of mechanical recycling, Trützschler from Germany has established itself as a full-line supplier. With its Truecycled concept, the company offers a comprehensive solution from cutting, tearing and carding to spinning preparation. In cooperation with Balkan Textile Machinery, it has been shown that yarns with a recycled content of up to 60% pre-consumer waste are possible – an important step towards true circularity.

Opportunities for suppliers of plant components and peripherals

But specialists in niche markets are also driving development forward. With its shredder-extruder technology, Austrian supplier Erema/Pure Loop has developed a process for PET fibres that is already in commercial use in the UK. At the same time, Hosokawa Alpine supplies proven cutting mills that have been continuously developed over many years and are used to shred old textiles.

In the field of sorting technology, companies such as Fibersort/Valvan and Newretex are demonstrating what is possible.

Using AI-supported NIR spectroscopy and RGB cameras, they achieve sorting speeds of up to one garment per second – including complete traceability of the material. HySpex/Neo goes even further in terms of precision, with hyperspectral systems that can separate even complex fibre mixtures with a high degree of accuracy.

Plant manufacturers such as Valmet, Margasa and Dell'Orco & Villani are also contributing decades of experience from related industries such as pulp and nonwoven production and successfully adapting this for textile waste recycling.

Torn textiles on a machine from the plant engineering company Andritz — Mechanical process engineering also plays a central role in paper recycling.

Start-ups with new approaches

At the same time, innovative start-ups are entering the market – such as Resortecs from Belgium. Using heat-soluble sewing threads and a thermal disassembly process, the company has developed a system that dismantles garments in a very short time and recovers up to 90% of the materials. Five lines are to be implemented by 2027.

Europe – especially German-speaking countries and Scandinavia – is playing a global pioneering role in all these areas. Its technological leadership ranges from intelligent sorting and mechanical processing to chemical recycling. The big challenge now is to translate these skills into scalable, economically viable solutions – while keeping an eye on the entire process chain.

For mechanical and plant engineering, this means that those who invest in development and partnerships at an early stage can position themselves as an integral part of the future textile industry. The demand for efficient, standardised and networkable systems will increase – as will the need for digitally supported services, material traceability and cross-process control. In short, those who help shape the textile cycles of tomorrow will secure a place in the market of the future – both ecologically and economically.

Author

Armin Scheuermann

Chemical engineer and freelance specialised journalist