Re4Circular- SoTecIn Factory

Atelier Riforma

April 5, 2024

Solution Name: Re4Circular

Target Challenge: Increasing the access to and affordability of circular services and reverse logistics.

Technology to manage the collection of post-consumer textiles in a transparent and circular way.

Solution Description

Re4Circular will allow to manage textile waste collected in an urban context in an efficient, transparent and circular way.

The core part of the solution consists of a technological tool that will be provided to all the entities that collect used textiles. It helps them to classify and track the collected textiles and to direct them towards circular destinations. Through a semi-automatic process, based on AI + NIR Spectroscopy, the textiles can be classified, recording the essential data to allow their valorisation in the circular economy.

All this data flows onto a digital platform, which can be accessed by any circular business that employs used textiles in their activity (vintage shops, refashioning artisans, textile recycling companies, etc.). Through the platform, they can find the most suitable textiles for their business, purchasing them online at wholesale prices.

In this way, the collection of textiles can be managed transparently and the residual value of each textile collected can be maximised – economically and environmentally.

For the municipality, the platform is an analysis and monitoring tool, with constant information on the quantities of textiles collected, on their characteristics (type of products, materials of which they are made, condition, etc.) and on the success rate of circular recovery.

Ours is currently the only service that dematerializes the sorting process of used clothing, digitizes the value chain and allows B2B demand (circular fashion business) and supply (used clothing collectors) for this resource to efficiently meet. Moreover, most of the solutions currently available on the market, dedicated to the management of end-of-life clothing, focus on recycling: our solution is the only one to date that targets all possible circular recovery processes, favouring those at the top of the hierarchy of waste.