According to Fashionnetwork, CETI (European Center for Innovative Textiles) and the French engineering school Estia have established a joint venture called Cetia, the fruit of a four-year investigation conducted in the framework of a research program called the Chaire BALI (Biarritz Active Lifestyle Industy). The objective is to expedite the recycling of apparel and footwear to help make the circular economy a reality. Decathlon and Eram, a French footwear producer and retailer, have been among the first clients.
Cetia has worked with them and a couple of luxury brands in the past year and a half to automate both the dismantling of sneakers and the analysis of their digital images, so as to recognize individual brands and models. With the support of France’s Nouvelle Aquitaine region, Cetia has now set up a workshop of 1,000 square meters in the town of Bidart, in the French Basque Country, with an initial budget is €1.5 million.
Cetia has broken down the problem of textile recycling into various parts: identification (through “artificial intelligence,” traceability tools and digital passports), automated sorting, characterization of materials and colors, and automatic dismantling. Cetia is also working within a ”System Circularity and Innovative Recycling of Textiles (SCIRT)” protocol to use cameras to determine which parts to remove from an item of apparel – logos, buttons, zippers, etc. – before recycling it.
One way to automate sorting is to use spectrographs, or so believe such investors in the technique as Siptex of Sweden, Valvan Baling of Belgium and Soex of Germany. Cetia has made a call for tenders to purchase such a machine from one of them, according to its director, Chloé Salmon Legagneur, who spoke with Fashionnetwork..
In addition to serving clients, Cetia hopes to serve as a proof of concept. “We will be working to specifications, set by the demands and needs of brands and collectors, and the technical needs of recyclers,” Salmon Legagneur said. Recycling has to figure into the very design of products, because the separation of elements is a “genuine feat,” she said.
In 2019 Cetia introduced Europe’s first combination recycling-spinning machine for cotton, blending recycled and virgin cotton into new thread. Since then, Eastman and Loop Industries have announced two large projects for the recycling of plastic and polyester in France, while ReFashion launched a platform in July to bring textile recyclers into contact.
