garment SORTING
In partnership with Salvation Army
Once clothing is collected from our bins, they will be sorted into items that can be worn again and ones that can't.
The clothes that can be worn again won't go into the recycling process, these will be sold to second-hand businesses. The clothes that are unsuitable to be sold on, will then be further sorted into like colours and fabric compositions in order to be recycled. One of the only places in the UK that have the facilities and technology to do this is the Salvation Army.
Salvation Army
Salvation Army is a registered charity. A division of their organisation called SatCol includes clothing collections and resale through their many Salvation Army charity stores.
They have a large textile sorting facility in Kettering, United Kingdom, that hosts technologically advanced ID equipment to sort through tonnes of clothing. This helps the recycling process by cutting down on intensive, slow manual labour and improves the precision needed to be able to create a circular textile flow.
We've partnered with Salvation Army to pave the way to recycling unwanted garments into new textiles and clothing..
Why do clothes need to be sorted?
In order for clothing to be recycled they need to be packed into lots of the same colour and same fabric type. These lots then get recycled to create yarn that has a maximum of 3 different types of fibres.
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Recycling fabric all in the same colour means that the yarn produced will keep to the same colour, taking out the need to dye the fabric again at a later stage which of course is a secondary benefit to the process.
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Garments also need to have trims such as zippers, labels and buttons removed, before they can be shredded and turned back into yarns ready for the recycled fabric itself to be constructed.
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