Fashion – Enter Wales: Novelle Yarn Project – Visit to Fibersort Amsterdam #14

Fashion-Enter CEO Jenny Holloway has just returned (7th & 8th June) from an inspiring visit to Fibersort in Amsterdam where machinery has been developed with Valvan Baling Systems for sorting and baling used clothing. She was accompanied by Debbie Potter, Director, and Richard Carter, Business Development Manager at The Potter Group. 

Back in 2006 and 2008, Hans Bon, director of the Dutch sorting company Wieland Textiles, had some shocking experiences, which ignited the first sparks in his development of Fibersort. While meeting a client in India, Hans visited a few recycling sites in Panipath where labourers, mostly children, were working for 10 to 12 hours per day under terrible conditions to sort enormous piles of mixed rags from the West with their bare hands. Such sites, where huge volumes of discarded clothes from Europe and the United States are sorted manually to deliver cheap feedstocks to the textile industry, still exist today. The experience motivated Hans to start looking for a technical innovation that could make this unsustainable work redundant.

After years of research and development Wieland joined forces with Valvan Baling Systems based in Belgium, to develop an alternative solution. Valvan started evaluating different suppliers of scanners and started building its own database and analysis software to enable the sorting application, under the brand name Fibersort. 

In 2016 the two companies collaborated with several partners to launch an EU-funded project under ‘Fibersort’, in which the partners attempt to close the textile-to-textile loop, including further development of the sorting application. It was within the framework of this Interreg-North-West Europe Fibersort project, on the 14th of March 2018 in Wormerveer, that Wieland and Valvan were able to present Fibersort as a proven NIR-technology for the automated sorting of post-consumer textiles. 

As we are all too aware the linear economy creates huge amounts of valuable fabric that is simply discarded as waste or down-cycled during textile recycling processes. This wasteful practice can be radically changed by Fibersort. This innovative technology automatically sorts mixed garments into homogeneous categories of up-front specified fiber types.

Automated sorting technologies could enable the industry to turn non-rewearable textiles that currently have no other destination than downcycling, landfill or incineration into valuable feedstock for textile-to-textile recycling. One of these technologies is the Fibersort, a Near Infrared (NIR) based technology able to categorise textiles in 42 different fractions based on their fiber composition, structure and colour. Over the past years, the technology has been optimised, tested and validated to prepare it for commercialisation. Fibersort is now able to sort ~900 kgs of post-consumer textiles per hour.

Jenny, Debbie and Richard were given an in-depth tour of the facility in Amsterdam where they could see firsthand the technology in use and the speed at which large volumes of garments and fibres are accurately sorted. 

Fashion-Enter CEO Jenny Holloway said: “The trip to Fibersort in Amsterdam proved to be enlightening. I had no idea that recycling had dramatically improved in terms of fibre sort. It’s now encouraging to see that there are cameras available that reflect the light of the yarn so that an accurate reading can be taken for six core fibres. Also there is the capability to sort by colour which is obviously very important. 

“With everything that is occurring in fashion today it is everybody’s duty to look at recycling and how we can use mixed fibres. To this end we are very grateful to the Welsh Government for allowing us and the Potter Group to explore opportunities that will reduce carbon emissions, upcycle clothes and also review the impact of Welsh wool and using it for mainstream, commercial applications for the retail industry. Watch this space for what happens next!”

More from the Novelle Yarn project next week.