The United Kingdom Fashion and Textiles (UKFT) is working on a £ 4 million budget project of developing a fully-integrated, automated sorting and pre-processing technology for textile waste.
The transition from uneconomic manual sorting of clothes to automated sorting and pre-processing will be made possible with Autosort for Circular Textiles Demonstrator (ACT UK), which is a two-year project.
The concept of UKFT for leading this project is set to revolutionise the industry by combining, innovating, and advancing the technology to out rule the issues concerned with material circularity.
The aim of the recycling project is to prevent tonnes of textile landfills and work on the advancement of technology for optical scanning, robotics, AI, preprocessing, and size reduction equipment all of which belong to one site.
The project partners for landfill prevention include IBM, Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Pangaia, English Fine Cottons, and WRAP among many others.
CEO of UKFT, Adam Mansell expressed, “With this ground-breaking project, we’re aiming to create a model to sort and prepare NRT for recycling in a way that’s never been done before, at scale. A national system of recycling plants could save 100,000s of tonnes of material from entering landfill. In turn, the system could generate huge volumes of material for use across the UK textile manufacturing sector.”
