Building the future of circular textile recycling in Europe.

AUTOLOOP aims to revolutionise the European textile and clothing industry by developing a scalable, intelligent system that combines AI powered sorting, pollutant resistant chemical recycling, additive tracing, and a Digital Product Passport compatible Data Hub.

Textile texture

Transforming Europe’s textile industry through technology, traceability & circularity

The European textile and clothing industry employs 1.3 million people across 197,000 companies, yet faces unprecedented challenges:

  • limited and costly manual sorting capacity
  • technical constraints in NIR-based automated sorting
  • recycling technologies that require pure feedstocks
  • textile waste contaminated with legacy chemicals
  • limited traceability and fragmented data
  • lack of standardization across the value chain

AUTOLOOP addresses all of these pain points at once.

A new circular value chain for
non-rewearable textiles

AUTOLOOP focuses on the lowest-value textile fractions—blended, impure, non-rewearable materials that currently have no viable recycling route. Through an innovative cascade of technologies, we convert these challenging materials into high-quality cellulose and synthetic fibres, ready for new textile production.

Our technological pillars:

1.

AI-Powered Hyperspectral
Sorting (AI-Sort)

Developed by ZORITEX, this next-generation system drastically increases speed, accuracy, and cost-efficiency by:

  • replacing manual sorting
  • detecting complex blends
  • enabling contactless identification of fibre tracers

This is a key step toward industrial-scale automated sorting of NRT.

2.

Cascade Chemical Recycling
(Ioncell®)

Ioncell® (Aalto University): Direct cellulose dissolution & dry-jet wet spinning to produce high-purity Lyocell fibres.

These processes extract or destroy pollutants, deliver safe, high-purity output fibres and enable true fibre-to-fibre recycling.

3.

Cascade Chemical Recycling
(ReSyn)

ReSyn (Fraunhofer & SKZ): Thermo-chemical conversion & selective monomer recovery to regenerate synthetic fibres.

These processes extract or destroy pollutants, deliver safe, high-purity output fibres and enable true fibre-to-fibre recycling.

4.

Integrated Smart Tracers (IntegriTEX®)

Developed by TLX, these material-embedded tracers:

  • authenticate fibres
  • support ecodesign
  • enable future contactless detection at sorting stage
  • improve product identification in Digital Product Passports
5.

A Cloud-Based Circularity Data Hub

TEXroad’s Data Hub connects all actors through:

  • real-time data exchange
  • DPP-compatible product information
  • standardised formats
  • interoperability across stakeholders
  • support for LCA, logistics, chain of custody, and business development

This digital backbone enables a fully transparent and efficient textile ecosystem.

Learn more about our
Work Packages

Work Package 1

Coordination and Management

This work package ensures effective coordination and management of AUTOLOOP by overseeing work package execution, supporting the governing bodies, and providing clear reporting of project outcomes. Led by Fraunhofer UMSICHT, its primary objective is to deliver on AUTOLOOP's goals across all work packages.

Work package 2

AI powered automated sorting and optical recognition

Led by Zori Tex, this work package focuses on developing and validating AI-powered automated sorting (AI-Sort) technology, along with contactless optical tracer recognition and measurement of degree of polymerization (DoP)

Work package 3

Selective chemical recycling

Led by Aalto University, this work package will establish pilot plants and conduct trials in relevant environments to process and recycle both cellulose and synthetic fibers. The goal is to optimize and validate these technologies at TRL 5.

Work Package 4

Additive tracers & Data Hub

This work package, led by the University of Leeds, focuses on integrating additive tracers into recycled fabrics and garments, and validating the Data Hub, a data management system for the textile recycling value chain, at TRL 5.

Work Package 5

SSbD Value chain assessment

Led by TEMASOL, this work package assesses the sustainability of the AUTOLOOP value chain across economic, environmental, and social dimensions. It does this by implementing and adapting the SSbD methodology (steps 1-5).

Work Package 6

Dissemination, communication & exploitation

Led by LGI Sustainable Innovation, this work package handles external communication and dissemination. Its main goals are to share AUTOLOOP's activities and results with target audiences and key stakeholders, and to maximize the project's impact through long-term exploitation strategies. These activities support all other work paces.