Denim Finishing Robot: Sandblasting to ABB Arms

Almost every pair of faded jeans has been worked on after sewing: scraped, sprayed, washed with stones or marked with a laser so it looks worn. A denim finishing robot takes over the most dangerous of those steps, holding the spray gun or the scraper that a worker used to hold. This post follows the job from stone washing and hand sandblasting to the lasers made by the Spanish firm Jeanologia, then to the robots that now spray potassium permanganate on jeans in Turkey and Tunisia. It ends with where ABB robots could fit in a denim laundry. We found no ABB installation in denim finishing, so that part is about what its existing robots could do.

Mannequins in faded, worn look jeans outside a shop, 2009. Photo: Lion Hirth / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

How jeans got their worn look by hand, stone and sand

Levi Strauss & Co. credits Donald Freeland, who worked at the Great Western Garment Company, with inventing stone washed denim in the 1950s. The method spread widely in the 1980s. Laundries loaded jeans into large horizontal washers filled with pumice, and as the drum turned the stones pounded the fabric and rubbed away some of the indigo dye. The French designers Marithé and François Girbaud are generally credited with turning stone washing into an industrial process. It was costly, because the grit had to be washed out afterwards, and the cost of importing pumice from Italy, Greece and Turkey led to pumice mining in California, Arizona and New Mexico.

A young woman in rolled up dark denim jeans and a checked shirt in Queensland, 1952. Photo: Harry Poulsen / State Library of Queensland via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

For sharper fades on the thighs and seat, factories used sandblasting, a process Benjamin Chew Tilghman patented in 1870 for hard surfaces. On jeans, a worker aimed a blast of sand at each garment by hand, and the fine silica dust caused silicosis. In Turkey more than 5,000 textile workers have the disease and 46 are known to have died from it. A 2007 study found it very common among former denim sandblasters there. Several brands said they would drop the technique, and many laundries switched to hand scraping with sandpaper, followed by a spray of potassium permanganate, a strong bleach, to lighten the worn areas.

A worker sandblasting without proper protective equipment, the dust exposure that causes silicosis. Photo: NIOSH via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Lasers were the first real automation. Jeanologia, founded in Spain in 1994, introduced its denim laser in 1999, then G2 ozone machines in 2005 and e-Flow nanobubble finishing in 2010. A laser burns the fade pattern into the fabric from a design file, with no sand and no hand tools. In 2018 Levi's announced Project F.L.X. with Jeanologia, a laser process that cut the finishing time for one pair of jeans to about 90 seconds. Levi's said it would remove potassium permanganate from that finishing step.

Workers in masks hand sanding denim jeans at a garment factory, 2013. Photo: Fahad Faisal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots that spray and scrape jeans today

Lasers do not cover every effect, so many laundries still use potassium permanganate after the laser, and that spraying is where robots arrived first. In 2016 the Istanbul company Vav Technology launched two denim robots. The Eraser MD48 holds a scraping tool, and the company said it could finish about 4,000 trousers a day. The Da Vinci OB48 sprays the bleach, at about 6,000 pairs a day. Both copy the movements of a skilled worker that Vav records with a system it calls Clone Mac, so no person has to stand in the spray.

Workers in masks spraying potassium permanganate on jeans held on inflated forms, 2013. Photo: Fahad Faisal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In Tunisia, the jeans maker Sartex automated its spraying station at Ksar Hellal with Enova Robotics, a Universal Robots integrator. The cell uses UR5 and UR10 cobots with electric spray guns in front of a rotating carousel that carries the jeans. Sartex wanted to stop operators breathing the bleach and to end the repetitive strain injuries that the job caused, while still taking small orders from 100 pieces. Jeanologia has moved robots into the laser step as well. Its Handman system has two Twin Super lasers and a robot in each cabin that places the garments automatically.

Jeans fitted on inflated forms for potassium permanganate spraying in a denim plant, 2013. Photo: Fahad Faisal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

On 1 October 2026 WWD reported that Jeanologia's EIM software is being expanded into a wider tool to measure the impact of textile production. EIM, first developed in 2008, scores each finishing recipe for water, energy and chemicals, and also for the effect of manual treatments on workers. Hand scraping and hand spraying count against a recipe, which gives laundries one more reason to automate. None of the sources we found mention ABB robots in denim finishing.

Rows of industrial washing machines in a denim washing plant, 2013. Photo: Fahad Faisal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Where denim finishing robots go next

ABB already sells robots built for spraying. Its IRB 5500 paint robots coat car bodies, which we covered in our post on ABB paint robots, and the same path control could move a bleach spray gun over a pair of jeans on a mannequin. A GoFa CRB 15000 cobot could do the job the UR cobots do at Sartex, working next to the operator who loads the garments. Larger arms such as the IRB 1300 could load and unload jeans at a laser cabin in the way Handman does.

An ABB IRB 5500 paint robot, a design built to work in explosive paint booth air. Photo: ABB

A denim cell would usually be built and tested in RobotStudio first, where each fade pattern becomes a robot path and the spray rate is set to match. For people buying jeans, the change shows up in the shop: more pairs on the rail may have been faded by a laser or a robot arm. Brands that sell made to order jeans need cells that can switch from one design to the next without long setup, which suits software driven lasers and robots.

An ABB IRB 1300 small industrial robot with an operator holding the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

The open problems are cost, cloth handling and skills. Jeans are soft and every size sits differently on a mannequin, so a robot needs the garment in a known position before it sprays. Many laundries are in countries where hand labour is cheap, and a robot cell has to beat that cost. Sartex's integrator says its cell costs a tenth of the automation sold before it. The workers who once sprayed bleach also need training to run and program the cells. EIM scores give brands a way to check which of their laundries still do the dangerous steps by hand.

An ABB GoFa cobot loading parts into a machine at a small factory. Photo: ABB

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