With the textile industry staring down a 2028 digital product passport (DPP) deadline, one of circular fashion’s least glamorous problems is becoming its make-or-break constraint: sorting. RFID is being pitched as the fix—speeding identification from the pace of human hands to automated lines, and generating the item-level data brands will soon be expected to share.
New research from materials science and digital identification solutions provider Avery Dennison directly addresses one of the industry’s biggest infrastructure challenges in time. The global materials science and digital identification company’s report presented pilot data suggesting RFID could ease the manual-sorting crunch—long viewed as the key bottleneck preventing scalable textile circularity in the U.S. and EU.
“The evidence is clear: Organizations that invest in RFID technology today will lead tomorrow’s circular economy,” said Mathieu De Backer, vice president of innovation and sustainability at Avery Dennison. “Automated RFID-enabled systems have delivered efficiency boosts of three-times compared to manual sorting, while achieving up to 99 percent accuracy.”
Across several recent pilots, these automated RFID-enabled systems delivered efficiency boosts and captured rich data “that manual processes simply can’t match,” Avery Dennison reported. Take Texaid, for example. Every year, the European textile collection and sorting organization sorts roughly 80,000 metric tons of textiles into some 300 categories.
Through a joint initiative, Texaid and Avery Dennison investigated the impact of RFID-tagged garments on the European textile collecting and sorting sector. With the growing volumes of textile waste directed to separate textile collection and the urgent need for recycling capacity, the findings indicate that building data-based sorting capacity is crucial. To better grasp how RFID could benefit textile sorting processes, the duo jointly mapped out the current and future EU landscape of post-consumer waste.
An RFID-enabled sorting pilot showed clear gains in both throughput and traceability, boosting processing capacity while delivering up to 99.9 percent accuracy in item identification—including hard-to-read black garments and mixed-fiber products. The system also created a digital trail of each item’s movement, giving operators stronger visibility into material flows and enabling more detailed end-of-life reporting back to brands and retailers.
On efficiency, the pilot found a single manual sorter typically processes about 2,400 kilograms of textiles per day—roughly 22 garments per minute—while an automated RFID-enabled line can sort about one garment per second, or 60 per minute, based on Texaid calculations. The result: automated sorting ran nearly three times faster than manual work, positioning RFID as a scalable route to higher-volume post-consumer processing and the granular material data textile-to-textile recycling depends on.
“As DPP approaches, brands must invest in embedded RFID technology,” said Martin Böschen, CEO of the Switzerland-based Texaid. “It’s unlocking benefits across the value chain, from inventory management and theft prevention to automation sorting and end-of-life services,”
Apparel and footwear preprocessor ReCircled, meanwhile, faced inefficiencies in manual product identification that hindered automation and reduced processing accuracy for end-of-life garments. By incorporating Avery Dennison’s RFID-enabled integrated solution, the takeback solutions provider could automate the data capture to minimize human error.
In turn, ReCircled reportedly saw dramatic, quantifiable efficiency gains.
The solutions reportedly reduced scanning labor hours by 95.9 percent for one major brand and 99.93 percent for another. This was in tandem with “consistently achieving 99 percent accuracy compared to manual accuracy rates of 89 percent and 72 percent, respectively.” That technology enabled the identification of individual items and captured additional data, including the Electronic Product Code (EPC) for material weight, which was deemed crucial for external reporting requirements.
“The manual process of receiving, counting and identifying items is a significant bottleneck today. While we explore advanced technologies, we recognize that RFID is a proven and powerful solution today,” said Scott Kuhlman, CEO of ReCircled. “It allows us to instantly identify hundreds of items, minimizing manual labor, reducing errors and is the key to unlocking full automation—it’s even making single-item duty drawback a reality. We are eliminating waste and accelerating our entire operation.”
Beyond said efficiency gains, ReCircled’s pilot demonstrated how RFID can create new value streams by maximizing duty drawback claims and supporting more sophisticated material recovery processes.
For Advanced Clothing Solutions (ACS), the pilot partnership with Avery Dennison marked a “major leap” forward in the B Corp-backed organization’s journey toward complete, circular transparency. As Europe’s largest circular apparel hub, processing some 45,000 items a week, ACS needed real-time visibility for its various garment lifecycle management processes, across resale, rental, refurbishment and repair.
Using Avery Dennison’s solutions—such as embedded RFID labels, hardware technology, and its Atma.io connected product cloud—to assign individual digital identities to each garment, enabling tracking of items through all lifecycle stages. Such real-time visibility enhanced ACS’s operational efficiency and enabled “scalable management of high-volume garment flows,” per Avery Dennison, delivering massive time savings.
“For the first time, we can tell the full story of a garment’s life—where it’s been, how it’s been cared for and how it’s contributing to a more sustainable future,” said Andrew Rough, CEO of ACS. “By embedding RFID tags, it delivered a 90 percent saving on the time needed to identify and associate garments at check-in.”
