For textile recyclers, the bottleneck is no longer collection - it's sorting. As textile waste volumes continue to grow across Europe, the ability to accurately identify and separate complex textile streams is becoming one of the industry's biggest challenges.

At Textiles Recycling Expo 2026 in Brussels, PICVISA will showcase new developments in AI-powered textile sorting designed to address exactly this issue.

Among the highlights are expanded fibre recognition capabilities, allowing a wider range of textile compositions and blends to be identified and sorted at industrial scale. The company has also introduced automated differentiation between knitted and woven textiles - an important step toward producing cleaner, process-ready fractions for recycling.

One of the key developments presented by PICVISA is a fully automated textile sorting line created in collaboration with Girbau. By combining Girbau's Sortech automated feeding system with PICVISA's ECOSORT optical sorting technology, the solution automates garment separation, classification and material identification in a single continuous process.

Designed for growing volumes of post-consumer textiles, the system helps reduce manual handling while delivering a consistent flow of material for high-efficiency sorting operations.

These advances reflect a broader shift across the industry. As Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes and new EU requirements increase demand for traceable recycled materials, recyclers are looking beyond collection volumes toward the quality and consistency of recovered textile streams.

PICVISA returns to Textiles Recycling Expo 2026 as a Golden Sponsor and a finalist in the Innovation in Recycling Technology category.

📍 Brussels Expo 📅 24–25 June 2026