Valvan has charted the changes in the


textiles reuse/recycling sector where over the course of years the quality of used garment supply has gone down while labour and energy costs have gone up. Decloedt said that in the past a bale would contain a large amount of resaleable clothes, with 30% high quality garments, 50% medium quality, and only 20% that could not be worn again. Now the mix is about 10-15% high quality, 40% medium quality and 45-50% low quality which needs to be directed to fibre recycling. Staff costs in manual sorting have


increased, as the wage expectations of trained pricers become more inflated, said Decloedt. Automation is a solution for recyclers’ labour issues that Valvan has offered in the past and is now extending to automated sorting technology. The company works with reuse/recycling customers around the world to determine their needs, whether that be a single sorting system or a turnkey installation, and provides after-sales support through an experienced service and engineering team. The Fibersort technology on show at the


Textiles Recycling Expo uses near-infrared (NIR) and AI-driven models to scan and sort garments which are fed piece-by-piece either manually by two operators or by robot pickers. Decloedt said the system sorts on fibre, colour, volume, woven or knitted, and weight. The garments are blown into carts based on the fractions the recycler wants. Valvan says Fibersort systems can be


configured for: hybrid sorting lines for reuse and recycling, with integrated speech technology; and flexible layouts with turn


Valvan demonstrated its Trimclean and Fibersort technologies at the first Textiles Recycling Expo in Brussels in June. Image: AMI


conveyors and expansion capacity. The technology is scalable by connecting multiple cores together. Fibersort can be used in conjunction


with Valvan’s Trimclean system following cutting and guillotining of a garment fraction into clippings, said Decloedt. Trimclean upgrades the fraction by using multiple detection technologies to identify the presence of hard and soft trims like zippers, buttons, metals and labels, and then separating clean and contaminated clippings pneumatically. Valvan’s patented dual-sided detection increases efficiency and helps towards Trimclean’s consistent output results, according to the company.


Expo demonstrations Denmark-based NewRetex is another company wholly focused on textiles sorting


solutions. It was co-founded by entrepreneur Rikke Bech and Morten Balle to develop an automated textile sorting facility with a traceability system and the company opened its pilot sorting plant in Bjerringbro in 2022. At the Textiles Recycling Expo a demonstration of its technology proved highly popular with visitors. It was an “amazing” show for NewRetex, said Betina Theilgaard Lauridsen, Head of International Sales & R&D, due to the interest in its technology. The company supplies semi-automatic


Material composition is captured in the NewRetex sorting system. Image: AMI


12 Textiles Loop • Autumn 2025


lines, for manual feeding, and fully automatic single and double lines. In demonstration mode at the exhibition, visitors watched garments pass through the system’s stations, from robotised picking and feeding, through NIR sensor and RGB camera stages, to sorting outlets for different fractions. Theilgaard Lauridsen said NewRetex’s pilot plant in Denmark shows the scalability of the technology: the double line is 40 metres in length and can sort up to 31 fractions. The NewRetex sorting line can be equipped with one or two Thor feeding robots, with the latter option running at a combined throughput of 2,000 pieces/hour during normal operation. The company says its robot delivers reliable textile separation with a very low double-pick rate for all textiles, ranging from small socks and underwear to large bedsheets. The sensor package features a combination of up to four sensors, a decision server to do high accuracy sorting for recycling, and modular sorting recipe


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