The mountain of old textiles continues to grow in Germany every year. Less than 1% of this enters a closed recycling loop. Reasons for this include so-called “fast fashion,” which leads to an increasing amount of low-quality textiles, as well as the wide variety of materials, which makes efficient recycling even more difficult.

Today, sorting is mostly manual and is almost impossible to manage given the quantities: Of about 1.4 million tons, only about 200,000 tons are actually checked and allocated. The rest are thermally recycled or exported abroad. Automated processes are a key lever for keeping significantly more used textiles in circulation.

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