Europe’s Pursuit of Optical Sorting of Textile Wastes

The European Union and member countries are supporting advances in the optical sorting of textile wastes.  An excellent report, “Technical Monitoring on Optical Sorting and Textile Recognition Technologies at a European Level”, produced by France’s Eco TLC, a textile trade association, provides details on this support and the challenges faced in textile optical sorting.  Click here to read the report.

Textile waste is enormous.  Estimates found on the Internet are that in 2020 as much as 100 million metric tons of textiles might have been discarded globally. A substantial amount of this waste might be chemically treated so that the textile filers could be reused to make new textiles.  Being able to do so should significantly decrease the use of fossil fuels for producing synthetic textile fibers, e.g., polyesters, and free land for better use other than in growing cotton.

A major condition for increasing the chemical processing of waste textiles is for effective sorting of the textiles into categories related to the fibers making up the textile, e.g., sorting out polyester textile wastes from the other fiber types of wastes.  Although optical sorting of plastic wastes and other materials have been developed sufficiently well to be in commercial use, optical sorting of textile wastes needs further development.  The Eco TLC report referenced above provides an excellent review of the European status of optical sorting of textiles in 2020.