applications in furniture and highway acoustic panels. Valvan is involved in new textile
sorting and recycling projects in Italy and Spain, some of which are operated by waste management companies. Plures is a large multi-utility company recently formed from the merger of Alia Servizi Ambientali, Estra, and Publiacqua in Tuscany. The Plures Textile Hub in Prato was inaugurated in July and, when fully operational in 2027, will be able to process 20,000 tonnes/yr of post-consumer textile waste, equal to Tuscany’s separate waste collection needs, and 13,000 tonnes/yr of pre-consumer waste, mostly from the Prato textile district. Valvan calls this a hybrid installation, said Decloedt, as it combines sorting for reuse and sorting for recycling. Each item is subject to an initial manual sort for either stream. The recycling stream is processed by a Valvan Fibersort system (although this can also identify mis-sorted items to be redirected to the reuse stream) which collects lots of data for accurate sorting.
In Spain, Valvan has one ongoing
project with a waste management company that is starting a textile sorting and recycling operation, and another project with an established textile-for-reuse sorting company that is building a hub dedicated to recy- cling. Both companies are using Valvan’s Fibersort technology and also its Trimclean technology, which identifies and separates clippings that have hard and soft trims like zippers, buttons, metals and labels. Last year, Valvan collaborated with
Avery Dennison and Texaid to explore the possibility of RFID labels aiding NIR sorting of textiles. Using a Fibersort machine at Valvan’s Sorting Lab in Menen, the testing was very successful, said Decloedt.
Recommending dual strategy at sorting centres At the Textiles Recycling Expo, Trosort demonstrated its Sort Mate system which carries out grading and sorting in one automated step to improve efficiency and lower costs. The Sort
Mate system identifies material compo- sition and performs a 360° scan to detect all garment attributes, including brand and defects. A price is assigned for each item and AI routes each item into the correct stream. In a blog on its website Trosort says:
“While it may not be profitable to sort exclusively for recycling yet, the winners of the next decade will be those who master the high-margin reuse game while preparing for the high-purity recycling future.” It recommends a dual-track strategy to companies looking to invest in textile sorting centres: “Use AI and automa- tion to dominate the reuse market today, capturing every bit of value from every garment. But simultaneously, use that same technology to prove you can deliver the high-purity feedstock the recycling market requires. When the market finally unlocks, driven by regulation or falling costs, you don’t want to be starting from scratch. You want to be the first phone call the recyclers make because you already have the infrastructure to deliver.” ➜
sales@valvan.com
valvan.com
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