The EU generates 12.6 million tonnes of textile waste per year, with only 22% currently collected for reuse or recycling—the rest often incinerated or landfilled. With mandating separate textile collection across the EU by 2025, the collected amount is expected to increase and we must upscale sorting and recycling capacity and efficiency to ensure sustainable recovery of the material. SORT4CIRC’s overall ambition is to improve value creation and cost efficiency through automated sorting and innovative recycling. This will generate new revenue streams for sorters and recyclers by turning non-re-wearable textiles into valuable feedstock for high-value recycling. The project will strive to unlock the current technological gaps for textile identification and value-chain traceability, while providing an overall sound business case driving circularity within the textile value chain (TVC). The use of modern digital technology in the sorting process will make it easier to achieve comprehensive information of the materials and fabrication process steps and integrate it to automated presorting and sorting for recycling processes. The different & complementary techonolgies are interlinked with each other with interoperable architecture to achieve complete traceability. Results generated are cross-checked to ensure reliability and consistency, to make decision over its optimal channel for reuse or recycling. SORT4CIRC gathers all relevant expertise to develop a systemic transformative solution enabling a traceable, circular textile industry: industrial collector and sorter, design for recycling by allowing disassembly, technology developers (machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), imaging, hyperspectral, NIR, multisensors), recyclers (chemical, thermo-mechanical and mechanical), along with specialists in supply chain traking and tracing, digital passports, blockchain technology and IoT, textile business models, trade and LCC/LCA.

The tExtended project will achieve its overall objective of reduction of textile waste by 80% by within industrial-urbal symbiosis developing and demonstrating effective textile recovery, waste valorisation and recycling processes combined with digital tools, sensing systems and data-driven solutions to support sustainable circularity of textiles. We will develop a knowledge-based Blueprint, i.e. a master plan for a sustainable textile ecosystem. The basis of the Blueprint is a Conceptual Framework which determines the optimized utilization of textile flows, aiming for retention of value of materials in a safe and sustainable way. Based on the Blueprint, we will implement a real scale demonstrator, verifying its replicability and potential to reduce textile waste. tExtended brings together a multidisciplinary group of experts with complementary skills needed for twin transition in sustainable textile sector. Different types of organizations, research, industry, and non-profit organizations such as NGOs and municipal waste management are included. The consortium consists of actors with different roles in the textile recycling ecosystem: waste management, recycling, textile materials and textile products manufacturing. Participation of forerunner companies and actors involved in textile recycling enables us also to spread best practises for textile recovery and recycling around Europe and across the sector.