On the 14th of March 2018, after many years of joint research and development, Valvan Baling Systems and Wieland Textiles proudly presented Fibersort to a public of policy makers and representatives of the textile industry. For the first time in the history of the clothing industry, top-level representatives of the industry and government witnessed an optical technology sorting large amounts of mixed, discarded garments fast and efficiently into piles of apparel with the same composition and structure. They immediately realized the revolutionary potential of this technology: a cost-effective upcycling of discarded clothes into homogeneous feedstocks for new production cycles!

The added value of Fibersort can hardly be overestimated. Solely in the Netherlands, each year an ‘untidy’ amount of 170.000 tons of textile waste can now be re-used as high-value raw materials for the production of new clothes instead of being incinerated in the crematories of the linear economy. The missing links between being an interesting innovation and the large-scale application of Fibersort? Political will and serious investments by the clothing industry in a proven circular technology!