Recycling clothes is far more complex than it appears. Beyond the fabric itself, every garment contains threads, zippers, labels, buttons, and trims that must be removed before high-quality recycling can take place. Today, this separation is done mainly by hand, making textile recycling slow, expensive, and often unfeasible. As a result, less than 1% of textiles worldwide are recycled back into new textiles, and most end up being downcycled, exported, or incinerated.
Resortecs addresses this challenge by making garments easy to take apart. The company has developed an automatic disassembly solution based on two eco-design innovations:
- Smart Stitch™: heat-activated threads that melt at controlled temperatures (150–200°C), allowing fabrics to separate cleanly from trims such as zippers, elastics, or labels.
- Smart Disassembly™: industrial thermo-mechanical machines to automatically disassemble large volumes of garments and prepare them for textile-to-textile recycling.
The goal of this EIC-funded project was to advance the development of these technologies so they can be applied to a wide range of textile products already on the market. The project focused on three core areas:
1. Developing and validating new threads, rivets, and other assembly techniques with lower disassembly temperatures, better performance, and/or more industrial applications.
2. Designing the Smart Disassembly™ continuous system, including the engineering of the line and the selection of the most suitable sorting technologies for disassembled components.
3. Running large-scale industrial pilots with brands, manufacturers, and recyclers to validate the operational, environmental, and economic viability of the complete Resortecs solution.
By enabling true design-for-disassembly, the project addresses one of the largest barriers to textile circularity. Its results contribute directly to the EU Green Deal, the Circular Economy Action Plan, and the goal of building a competitive, climate-neutral textile industry in Europe.
