New Software for the Textile Sorting and Recycling Industry
The Danish company NewRetex A/S, specialized in AI-based and automated sorting of textile waste, has presented its Manufacturing Execution System (MES) called “Huginn”. This system, as stated by the company, “provides the textile sorting and recycling industry with complete data traceability, realtime production monitoring, and detailed business insights.”
Huginn has been developed to meet both regulatory requirements and market challenges, such as the need for traceability and transparency across the value chain through product passports, NewRetex stressed. The company’s system would support manufacturers in complying with future EU regulations such as the ECO Design Directives, “while helping them to achieve greater efficiency and sustainability in their processes”. The system would provide a textile sorting and recycling company “with all the information needed to monitor and optimize production, develop new sorting recipes, and of course achieve full traceability of all the textiles being sorted and recycled”. As underlined, the textile industry is increasingly focusing on recycled materials to meet the growing demand to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint and increase circularity. “However, tracking and verifying recycled materials in an end product is often a major challenge for the industry. NewRetex now offers a solution for this: the innovative MES was named after the mythological raven Huginn, which stands for thought and observation.”
The system would continuously collect and analyze data, and provide real-time KPIs (key production indicators) from the sorting and recycling processes. By integrating this advanced system with their automated sorting technology, NewRetex would offer “precise material and color sorting with fully automated data collection and traceability”. Due to this automated sorting technology, the company earned a GRS (Global Recycling Standard) certificate “as one of the first textile sorting companies worldwide”.
According to NewRetex the benefits of “Huginn” are:
- “Full traceability: NewRetex MES enables full traceability from textile waste to finished fiber products for end users, ensuring compliance with regulations such as ECO Design guidelines and GRS certification. Automated reporting enables effortless documentation, and APIs ensure seamless integration with product passport platforms.
- Real-time data: Continuous data collection provides valuable insights into every stage of the sorting and recycling process. This allows plant managers to optimize their sorting operations, monitor production rates, track their inventory and automatically generate reports with data visualizations.
- Mobile and web interfaces: Production workers can easily access the system from their phones to register material moving through the factory using QR codes. Desktop interfaces can be used by supervisors or information screens.
- Scalability: The system is adaptable and designed to evolve with technological advances and market demands. Multisite operations are supported, allowing Huginn to become a tool for material pooling and value chain optimization on a large scale.”
(Published in GLOBAL RECYCLING Magazine 1/2025, Page 21, Photo: NewRetwx)
