Blog
A digital product passport for textiles could be the missing link between a garment's design and its eventual recycling – provided sorting technology can act on the information it provides.
One of the persistent challenges in textile recycling is simply not knowing what a garment is made of by the time it reaches end of life – labels fade, get removed, or were never accurate in the first place. The EU's proposed digital product passport aims to solve this by attaching verifiable material information to products throughout their life cycle, including at the point of recycling.
The EU's broader textile strategy aims to make the sector more circular – encouraging durable, repairable, and recyclable garments, supported by mandatory separate collection. A digital passport fits into this strategy by providing the information needed to route a garment to the right recycling process once it's collected, rather than relying on visual inspection or guesswork.
France has been ahead of much of the EU in building out textile collection and sorting infrastructure, giving it a head start in piloting how digital passport information could integrate with existing sorting operations – an advantage that's likely to inform how the system is rolled out more broadly across the bloc.
In Spain, technology companies including PICVISA are part of the broader push towards textile recycling infrastructure, contributing the sorting capability that will need to work alongside whatever digital passport system eventually takes shape – since passport data is only useful if sorting facilities can act on it at the speed and scale that commercial recycling requires.
Whatever form the digital passport eventually takes, physical sorting will remain essential – not every garment will carry passport information, especially in the years immediately after the system is introduced, and sorting facilities will need to identify fibre composition directly for a large proportion of incoming material. PICVISA's ECOSORT TEXTIL technology, which classifies textiles by composition, colour and shape using optical separation, provides exactly this capability – complementing digital passport data where it's available, and standing in for it where it isn't.
Get in touch with our team to discover how PICVISA's optical sorting and robotics solutions can fit your recycling operation.