HENDAYE, France: The fashion industry’s waste and pollution have created a pressing need for clothing recycling, which is now being addressed with the help of machines. Cetia, a company in southwest France, has developed mechanical solutions to tackle the challenges of recycling clothes. One of their inventions is an artificial intelligence-based machine that scans garments, identifies and removes hard elements like zippers and buttons using a laser. They have also created a machine with a large mechanical arm that can extract shoe soles. While this technology may seem basic when compared to advancements in space travel and vaccines, it is a significant step forward.
“It was a chicken and egg question. No one was recycling soles because we couldn’t separate them from the shoe, and no one was separating them because there was no recycling,” said Chloe Salmon Legagneur, the director of Cetia. In the past, recyclers had to spend many hours baking the shoes to melt the glue and manually remove the sole.
“There’s nothing spectacular in what we’ve done,” Legagneur admitted. “But we’ve done it.” Currently, only around 1% of textiles in Europe are converted into new clothes, with the majority being repurposed as insulation, padding, or asphalt for roads due to the complexity of separating different materials. Cetia’s AI-laser machine offers a much faster and evolving solution to this problem.
The emergence of these inventions is primarily due to impending European regulations that will require clothing companies to incorporate a certain percentage of recycled fibers in their garments. Cetia’s work is supported by major retailers like Decathlon and Zalando, who are actively seeking industrial-scale solutions. Furthermore, the French government sees the potential for new manufacturing jobs if recycling technology can handle the current annual export of 200,000 tonnes of textile waste.
Cetia’s focus is to prepare textiles for reuse, while other companies will be responsible for melting down the separated soles and transforming them into new ones. Despite being just the initial step, it is a crucial one. “As long as we do not have systems to prepare materials for recycling, we will not have a recycling sector in France,” stated Veronique Allaire-Spitzer from Refashion, an organization dedicated to waste management. Refashion has invested €900,000 (RM4.54mil) into Cetia, and the regional government has made a similar contribution.
“None of this is a magic idea. It’s just common sense,” Legagneur emphasized. “But it’s about bringing together engineers, financing, and companies in need of these solutions. Only now are these components aligning. Ten years ago, no one wanted it.” – AFP
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