Vinnova, the Swedish government’s research and development agency, and IVL, the Swedish Institute for environmental research have opened the world’s first fully automated textile sorting plant in Sweden. The plant is being designed and built by Stadler and Tamara as a part of the SIPTex project. This is the third phase of the project which began with the start-up of the fully automated sorting plant Sysav Industry AB in Malmö. The plant has a capacity of upto 4.5 ton/hour in one line. The incoming material is delivered in bales comprising pre-and post-consumer textile waste, i.e. industrial waste such as cuttings, yarns, and scrap, and used domestic clothing and textiles.

In the third phase, the project aims to ascertain that the system can all be sorted and separated by type and quality. The company also aimed to determine if it could successfully operate on an industrial scale, and the output fractions can achieve the purity and recovery required for recycling and reutilization also there is no industrial-scale technology for recycling textiles without down-cycling them.