EU pilots automated textile collection linked to EPR and digital product passports

From policy concept to practical experiment: the EU is testing automated systems that pay consumers to return used clothing, linking collection directly to reuse, recycling and upcoming regulatory frameworks.

The European Commission has launched a multi-year pilot project testing automated collection and sorting systems for post-consumer textiles in Spain and Finland.

The project, known as TexMat and led by Finland’s VTT Technical Research Centre together with partners in seven EU countries, uses “smart” drop-off bins that scan garments, assess their condition and automatically sort them for reuse or recycling. Consumers are rewarded based on the estimated second-hand value of the items they return.

Crucially, the system is designed to integrate with forthcoming EU policies, including extended producer responsibility schemes for textiles and digital product passports. Returned garments can be tracked, valued and directed toward reuse before being classified as waste.

The pilots, running from October 2025 to March 2029, aim to address one of the textile sector’s core challenges: ensuring that separately collected clothing actually finds viable downstream outlets.

As the EU moves closer to mandatory textile collection, the project offers a glimpse of how financial incentives, digital tracking and sorting infrastructure could reshape the economics of reuse.