"Circular Textile Framework" concludes with promising results
As the Circular Textile Framework project comes to an end after two years, two important tools are presented with the aim of enabling efficient use of resources and providing Swedish companies with concrete opportunities to work with recycled and recyclable materials, as well as ensuring stable quality of products made with recycled content.
Wargön Innovation has provided expertise in the development of the framework and tools, and also led the work to explore how AI and digitalization can be integrated into these solutions.
- Our work in this project has highlighted how crucial digital product passports are for efficient textile recycling. At the same time, we have identified challenges when consumers modify garments, which can create discrepancies between the original product data and the actual state of the garment at sorting. Going forward, we see great potential in exploring how AI-based image recognition can bridge this gap, as well as how valuable data from collection and sorting processes can be used to improve design tools and drive the development towards a more circular textile industry," says Gabriella Engström, Project Manager at Wargön Innovation.
The Classification Tool is a tool that helps companies determine the optimal recycling method and textile fraction for materials (?) to ensure the highest quality and value. The work on the tool has resulted in a number of important insights that will form the basis for future work. Among other things, the necessary data for digital product passports (DPP) to enable large-scale, high-quality recycling has been defined. Critical data points for improved automatic sorting of textiles have also been identified, as well as insights into the importance of optimizing products for recycling already at the design and production stage.
A tool to guide the assessment of a product's circularity(Circularity Toolkit) has also been developed within the project.
By establishing this framework, the project has laid the foundation for a more efficient use of resources and provided Swedish companies with concrete opportunities to work with recycled and recyclable materials with stable quality.