It’s a wrap! SCIRT celebrated the end of its journey in November 2024. After 3,5 years, SCIRT presented its results at Biarritz Good Fashion and shares a memo of all of its results.

SCIRT had the ambition to demonstrate the industrial production of new garments with a highest possible recycled content (from post-consumer textile waste), respecting the required characteristics for brands to include these in their regular collections. So of course, having these garments in the brands’ stores in Fall 2024, is a key outcome!

Moreover, the research conducted throughout the project has led to exciting findings. We have developed a method to accurately determine the elastane content of a fabric, as well as the consecutive removal thereof. This can have an important impact towards facilitating recycling of textiles containing elastane. Before going to recycling, textile waste needs to go through accurate sorting: recycling processes have very specific input requirements in order to produce high quality secondary materials. ‘Rubbish in, rubbish out’ is a valid statement when it comes to textile recycling. So the sorting step was another key aspect of research SCIRT focused on. Automated sorting, at high speed and with high accuracy, and automatic dismantling (separation of parts that contain) zippers, buttons, labels, …) have been developed and implemented as Fibersort 2.0 and Trimclean.

Read more in the full memo!

Read the full memo here.