Germany's Deutsche Telekom initiates smart textile recycling

The intelligent collection containers also reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by optimising transport routes.

As part of the European Union's Green Deal, the requirements for recycling old textiles must be met by 2025. Returning these textiles requires a separate collection system. In the past, Deutsche Telekom employees disposed of their old work clothes themselves. However, all logos had to be removed beforehand. As a result, the cut-up clothing was unusable and, according to the waste directive, had to be disposed of in the residual waste. Now Deutsche Telekom is giving workwear a second chance through intelligent textile recycling.

Deutsche Telekom equips textile collection containers with fill level sensors. These sensors measure and send the current fill level to the cloud via Deutsche Telekom's NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT) machine and sensor network. Here, the data is processed and clearly displayed in an online portal. This way, Remondis knows when a container is full and is due to be emptied. The intelligent solution avoids unnecessary fill level checks and optimises the collection cycles of the textile containers. The Boer Group then recycles the collected textiles into fibres in a multi-stage process.

In addition to work clothes Deutsche Telekom has been collecting discarded jeans in smart textile containers since December 2021. Over 2,380 kg of textiles have been recycled since then. This corresponds to 15.71 million liters of water saved and 35.7 tons less CO2 emissions. Currently, recycling containers for workwear are located outside Deutsche Telekom sites in Bonn, Cologne, Bochum and Berlin. Additionally, 25 smart textile garbage cans are located in the office buildings in Bonn, Cologne, Leipzig, Saarbrücken, Frankfurt and Chemnitz. The goal is to roll out recycling facilities across all Deutsche Telekom sites in Germany.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (RR)