Tech to recycle clothes only just being invented

The vast waste and pollution caused by the fashion industry has made recycling clothes a top priority, but only now are simple tasks like pulling the sole off a shoe being done by machines.

CETIA, a company in the southwest of France is finally offering some mechanical solutions to the challenges of recycling clothes.

Its research team has invented a machine that uses artificial intelligence to scan garments, identify hard elements like zippers and buttons, and use a laser to cut them out.

It has also built a machine that grabs shoes in a large mechanical arm and yanks off the soles.

In a world of space travel and vaccines, that may seem a relatively rudimentary piece of technology, but it had simply never been done before.

"It was a chicken and egg question. No one was recycling soles because we couldn't separate them from the shoe, and no one was separating them because there was no recycling," said Chloe Salmon Legagneur, director of CETIA.

Previously, recyclers had to bake the shoes for many hours to melt the glue and then pull the sole off by hand.

"There's nothing spectacular in what we've done," Legagneur said.

"But we've done it."

For now, barely one percent of textiles in Europe are turned back into new clothes.

Most end up as housing insulation, padding or asphalt for paving roads.

That is because clothes are usually a complex mix of materials that must be separated carefully to keep the fibers in good condition if there is any hope of respinning them into new garments.

Usually done by hand, CETIA says its AI-laser machine can do this at a much faster rate that is rapidly evolving as it perfects the technology.

It also has machines that can sort clothes by color...