Testing the technology on textiles
The plant in Malmö is the third phase in the SIPTex project, and follows an initial theoretical study and, in phase two, the construction of a small pilot plant in Avesta, also designed and supplied by STADLER and TOMRA in 2017. In this second phase, the project collected 700 tonnes of used textiles from recycling centers. Following a manual pre-sorting of reusable textiles, the waste material was fed into the Avesta pilot plant.
“Our main objective was to test our equipment’s capability to sort the textiles and identify any changes or optimizations to the process that may be required,” says STADLER International Sales Manager Urban Kozinc. “The main challenge was that automated textile sorting had never been done before. Working on this pilot plant we have understood that the feeding system is very important, that the hoppers and chutes need a special design because of the size of the textile material, and that the conveyors needed special belts. We also had to find the way to achieve a constant material flow, without peaks. And we learned that labelling on the textiles is not always 100% correct. In this phase of the project we gained the knowledge we needed for the third phase, the Malmö industrial-scale plant.”
The world’s first fully-automated textile sorting plant
The automated textile sorting plant in Malmö has a capacity of up to 4.5 tonnes/hour in one line. The incoming material is delivered in bales, typically weighting 350 to 500 kg. It includes pre- and post-consumer waste. The former consists of dry, industrial waste from textile producers such as clippings, yarn and rejects. The latter is made up of clothing and household textiles, which include unsorted material from separate collection from sources such as recycling centers, and manually pre-sorted and industrial waste from textile leasing and rental services. The material is sorted whole and may contain buttons, zippers and other non-textile parts.
The plant was entirely designed by STADLER in close cooperation with TOMRA. The project has included the supply of the dosing system, conveyor belts, NIR Optical Sorting Units, high-speed conveyor belts, bunker belts, baler, steelwork, electrical and control system, compressed air system and de-dusting system.