Textile Recycling Robot: Rag Sorters to ABB Pickers

A textile recycling robot has to do what rag sorters have done by hand for two centuries: pick up a crumpled garment, decide what it is made of and drop it in the right pile. Sorting is the step that decides whether old clothes become new fibre or end up burned or exported. This post goes from the shoddy mills of Yorkshire to the near infrared sorting lines of the last decade, then to the automated plants opening in 2026. It covers where ABB robots such as the IRB 360 FlexPicker could fit with vision, and what still makes clothing so hard to sort.

Bales of second hand clothing being unloaded from a store, 2010. Photo: alison.mckellar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How rag sorters and shoddy mills recycled cloth by hand

Clothing recycling is old. In 1813 Benjamin Law of Batley in Yorkshire found a way to shred woollen rags and spin the fibres again, and the result was called shoddy. The trade became the main industry of Batley and the towns around it, known as the Heavy Woollen District, through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Every rag had to be sorted by hand before it went into the shredder. Shoddy later became a word for any cheap, poorly made goods, though inside the trade it is still the technical term for recycled wool.

A worker at a spinning frame in a British mill turning salvaged rags into new cloth, April 1942. Photo: Richard Stone / Imperial War Museums via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

When the British shoddy trade declined, the centre of rag wool moved to Panipat in India, where the rag wool trade carries on. Charity shops and collectors in Europe and North America built their own sorting rooms for donated clothes. Sorters there still work fast and by eye and touch, deciding in seconds whether a garment can be resold, sent abroad, cut into wiping rags or sent for recycling. The label is often missing or wrong, so a trained sorter feels the fabric, and machines have struggled to copy that judgment.

Women sort rags by hand at the American Writing Paper Company in Holyoke, Massachusetts, around 1936. Photo: Lewis Hine / US National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first serious automation came with near infrared sensors, the same kind that sort plastics in recycling plants. Fibersort, a machine from the Belgian company Valvan developed with Circle Economy and partners in an EU project, scans each garment on a belt with near infrared light, reads its fibre mix and diverts it to the right bin. Machines like this sort by material and colour much faster than a person reading labels. They still need people to load garments one by one, flat and spread out, and to pull out shoes, belts and anything with buttons and zips.

A rag sorter at the same Holyoke mill grades scraps by eye and touch, around 1936. Photo: Lewis Hine / US National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Automated textile sorting plants in 2026

This year sorting moved from pilots to plants. Salvos Stores in Australia is opening what it calls the country's first automated textile sorting and decommissioning system at Carole Park in Queensland, using Belgian technology to sort unsellable garments and remove buttons, zips and other hard parts. On 23 September 2026, Marks and Spencer, New Look and Sainsbury's joined Oxfam and Circle-8 in The Circuit, a UK project to turn post-consumer textiles into raw material. Its first phase starts in January 2027 at Oxfam's site in Batley, the same town where shoddy began, and centres on automated sorting.

A textile recycling collection lorry from Choice on a British high street, 2023. Photo: Philafrenzy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Most of these lines use conveyors, scanners and air jets, with people at the start and the end. Robots enter where a garment has to be grabbed. Researchers are building cells where a camera finds a garment in a pile, a robot arm lifts it and a near infrared sensor checks the fibre before the arm drops it in a bin. Cloth is light, so the arm can be fast and small. This is the kind of pick and place job ABB's IRB 360 FlexPicker was built for. It is a delta robot that picks items from a moving belt at high speed using camera guidance and conveyor tracking.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robots picking items on a moving line. Photo: ABB

ABB has not announced a textile sorting project, so its role here is a possibility. Our post on curbside recycling looks at how delta robots like the FlexPicker fit waste sorting lines. ABB's Robotic Item Picker adds AI vision for grabbing items it has never seen, which suits clothing that comes in endless shapes. Heavier jobs, such as moving bales of sorted textiles, fit ABB palletizers like the IRB 460 and IRB 660. A picker working beside a moving belt depends on conveyor tracking, the same feature food lines use.

ABB's Robotic Item Picker, a small ABB arm with a suction gripper above two picking bins. Photo: ABB

Where textile recycling robots go next

Rules are pushing the work forward. Extended producer responsibility for textiles is rolling out across the EU, which means brands will pay for collecting and treating the clothes they sell, and recyclers will need clean, well sorted feedstock. A chemical recycler wants pure polyester or pure cotton, and a blend with an elastane waistband can spoil a batch. That puts pressure on sorting accuracy, and robots that can grab a garment, scan several spots and cut out zips or labels could raise the share of clothes that become new fibre.

An orange textile collection container beside household waste bins, 2022. Photo: Daniel Capilla / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Cloth is still hard to handle. A sweater in a pile has no fixed shape, it tangles with its neighbours and it hides its label, which is why research on folding and sorting garments with robots, often with two-armed robots like ABB's YuMi, is still mostly in labs. Our post on laundry and cloth handling covers that work. For a sorting cell, engineers can test pick paths, cycle times and bin layouts in RobotStudio before any garment arrives, then add the vision system on site.

ABB's dual arm YuMi, the robot used in much cloth handling research, beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

Cost and skills will decide the pace. Used clothing is worth little per kilogram, so a sorting robot has to pay for itself through speed and accuracy, and recycled fibre has to compete with cheap new polyester. At home, the change will be less visible: take back bins in shops and charity collections that feed these plants. Sorters will not vanish soon. People will keep grading the garments good enough to resell, which are worth more than any recycled fibre, while machines take on more of the rest.

A clothing and shoe recycling bin outside a shop, 2013. Photo: Gobonobo / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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