Before any clothing can be recycled, it must be taken apart. This process, known as disassembly, is quickly becoming a major sticking point in the race to scale textile-to-textile recycling.
“You cannot make a [recycled] yarn if there’s a button or a zipper in it,” says Ellen Mensink, founder and CEO of Amsterdam-based circular textile producer Brightfiber.
Now, more than ever, it’s something fashion and recyclers need to figure out. Regulation is coming, via extended producer responsibility (EPR) mandates, as eco-design rules, the availability of materials to recycle, and non-destructive disassembly become ever-pressing matters for compliance.
“In the next couple of years, it’s going to be crucial for designers to have [disassembly] tools in the toolbox to make better products,” says Kristoffer Stokes, co-founder and CEO of D-Glue. D-Glue is a patented technology incubated by Boston-based plastics and textile consultancy Geisys Ventures, which can be added to existing adhesives to make them debondable under heat.
Most clothing is designed without any consideration for how it might be disassembled at the end of its life; designers and product developers instead focused on style, fit, functionality, or durability. Elements such as tapes applied to make seams waterproof, rivets to reinforce pockets, or embroidery applied for decoration all make disassembly considerably harder. As a result, each company processing recycled clothing has to design its own approach, meaning fashion is far from a clear path to circularity.
Same problem, different method
The struggle to scale disassembly is characterized by the ways individual recyclers and producers increase processing capacity to answer growing demand.
Luxury fabric producer Manteco is located in Prato, a region of Italy known for textile recycling. Locally, the worker who sorts clothes by color, quality, and composition is known as a cenciaiolo and regarded as a highly skilled artisan, able to tell the difference between a woolen and a worsted yarn just by look and feel. Manteco regularly shares footage of its cenciaioli sitting among piles of textiles, cutting up garments, and tossing sections into color-coded baskets. In 2023, over 1.3 million kilograms of textiles were processed in this manner, according to the company’s most recent sustainability report.
Giuseppe Picerno, head of innovation and sustainability, believes that eventually automatic sourcing will be possible with AI training, but for now, the technology is simply not robust enough to ensure only high-quality inputs make it through to the recycling stage. “Technology is not sufficient to ensure good quality, and the quality of the input material is one of the pillars of our success. We need highly experienced operators,” Picerno says.
The company has its roots in recycling high-quality wool blankets, knits, and shirts, but today’s ceniaioli must deal with the increasing volumes of low-quality garments flooding the market, Picerno says. It’s an issue that complicates disassembly, as synthetic yarns and threads, elastics in place of tailoring, and plastic adornments must be identified and removed, reducing the yield of a piece of clothing pre-recycling.
“The efficiency of our operation depends mainly on how the garments are constructed,” says Picerno. “A garment with a lot of embroidery is more difficult to recycle, [whereas] a wool sweater is very easy to recycle; it’s sufficient to cut the labels out of the seams.”
Spanish textile-to-textile recycling company Coleo, which processes over 2.5 million kilograms of textile waste per year, takes a more segmented approach. It uses AI technology to sort the textiles it collectss into different waste streams and compositions. But disassembly is handled manually, with employees using electric tools to cut around buttons, or slice off zips and labels, a slight efficiency gain on the ceniaioli’s traditional hand-cutting. “The textile recycling business is very cost-restrictive, so we always have automating the process in mind. But as of today, we are doing it manually,” says Coleo’s marketing director, Nacho Bueno Fornés.
Coleo has used the necessity of manual disassembly as an opportunity to build the social impact arm of its business, operating the Coleo Recycling Special Employment Centre to support people with disabilities — who make up 87% of the staff, according to reports shared with Replica Handbag Store Business — into work with permanent employment contracts. Brightfiber’s Mensink, who has an extensive history in textile circularity, having owned a circular knitwear brand and chaired sustainability innovation labs, had worked with such social enterprises for years.
But when founding Brightfiber in 2025, Mensink had to change tack. The 2015 Participation Act in the Netherlands brought about the closure of many so-called “sheltered workshops” (employment centers for people with disabilities that undertook industrial work, including packing, assembly, and disassembly) as the government sought to encourage more integrated employment in the wider job market. But the infrastructure and labor power no longer exist at the levels necessary to meet demand, says Mensink. A government-led transition away from sheltered workshops and toward further integration into the wider Dutch job market meant many had closed. “We decided we needed to do it automatically,” she explains. While others hope to bring in automation in the future, Brightfiber is proving it can work now, at scale.
The solution was to develop a machine that can remove buttons, zips, and labels using metal detection and camera technology to help process three million kilograms of textile waste annually. But it wasn’t developed in isolation; it’s one in a chain of automated processes. “You need to know how one machine works with the other, because if you put rubbish in the first machine, you get rubbish out of the second and the third,” Mensink says.
The first machine uses near-infrared (NIR) technology to sort by color and composition. Then, the machine for removing contaminants is calibrated to process a specific batch, such as denim or jersey. This ensures it produces the highest quality output possible to feed into the next machine, which turns the textiles into fibers to be spun into new yarns. Though the process requires less manual intervention — only checks between lines — Mensink says that after developing the machine, the cost of automated disassembly was almost equal to that of manual disassembly. In the long run, however, automation is more cost-efficient and increases its capacity to process higher volumes more quickly.
Brightfiber isn’t alone in pushing automation. In 2025, the Golisano Institute for Sustainability, based in the US’s Rochester Institute of Technology, announced the development of an automated system that uses AI to detect — and robotic laser cutters to remove — non-recyclable elements, operating at a rate of one garment every 10 seconds. Nike provided industry guidance in the project’s early stages, while polyester recycler Ambercycle and non-profit thrift store operator Goodwill were on board as collaborators for testing and insights for the technology, which is currently in its pilot phase.
Designing for disassembly
As producers and recyclers seek out efficient ways to deal with what spills out of the fashion industry, select designers, manufacturers, and textile innovators are spearheading solutions that can make disassembly faster and simpler in the future.
“Almost 100% of the garments we receive at our company are not made to be recycled,” says Manteco CEO Matteo Mantellassi. “If you sew a wool sweater with a polyester thread, you need to cut 80% of the garment. But if just a few elements changed in the design, this could change the recyclability of the garment.” Since 2016, the company has trained students at its Manteco Academy in design for disassembly, using waste it’s cut away to bring the problem to life for the next generation of designers. “We have to advance this kind of mentality to find a new business model for the fashion industry,” Mantellassi says.
A handful of brands and producers have taken charge of design for disassembly and circularity in recent years. French trims manufacturer Dorlet developed a screw-in, removable jeans button as an alternative to the standard models, which are hammered in and then cut off during recycling. Japanese fastening manufacturer YKK, meanwhile, has developed a similar product, as well as monomaterial fasteners — zips, buttons, and rivets that can be recycled as one with products made from the same material.
Monomaterial design is a popular approach to the disassembly problem because it can circumvent it entirely. In April 2024, Swiss brand Freitag — known for turning used truck tarps into accessories — launched its MonoPA6 collectsion. All elements, from the fabric to the clasps, are made from a singular material, so the bags can be shredded and recycled in their entirety without any need for disassembly. In February 2025, outdoors brand The North Face released the Dryvent Mono, which can also be recycled as a single element, following on from a similar release by Helly Hansen in 2021. Such collectsions, however, remain the exception among wider brand offerings, rather than the standard.
Another solution is dissolvable threads and adhesives, which allow dismantling without cutting, reducing the associated offcut waste. Norwegian company Around Systems’s SeamLock dissolves when heated under pressure; while Stokes and his co-founder Philip Costanzo developed D-Glue because “adhesives play an important role in things like rainwear and outerwear, but it is not easy to pull these things apart”, he explains. Belgian company Resortecs’s Smart Stitch thread dissolves under heat, and has been used by brands including Bershka and Decathlon.
The companies stress that threads and adhesives represent a relatively small part of any product, making them a cost-efficient option. D-Glue is currently working with a handful of global adhesive companies to test cost, scale, and market validity assumptions, though it cannot name any industry partners.
Still, there are drawbacks to these solutions. Some criticize monomaterial design for limiting creativity and being niche in application. The heat required for dissolvable thread and adhesives can damage certain materials and may also increase carbon footprints, thanks to the energy output needed. Adoption hurdles persist. Resortecs CEO Cédric Vanhoeck acknowledges that it will likely take years for products featuring Smart Stitch to make their way into recycling systems, a barrier for recyclers to commit to using the technology. “If a majority of products don’t have [thermal disassembly capability], why would you invest in disassembly equipment?” he says. For now, Resortecs is seeking to bridge that gap by handling disassembly in-house with its Smart Disassembly system.
A systems approach
While innovations could help make new products easier to disassemble in the future, they don’t help with the mountains of textile waste already in existence. Recyclers must grapple to find the best solutions for their processes to maximize what can be reused. It underscores the issue in hand: as with any matter of sustainability progress, a single solution won’t be enough; the physical act of disassembly is one step in a long chain of decision-making and processes.
Like Resortecs, Around Systems offers its thread technology as part of a wider system. At the beginning is a digital planning platform that provides designers with end-of-life pathways depending on the material and construction decisions they make. Sitting alongside SeamLock in the production phase is a product ID system that informs the final phase: automated sorting and disassembly completed according to the information attached to the product ID, such as material type and trims included in the garment.
“The challenge is organizational rather than technical,” says Around Systems chief product officer Brigitta Danka. “The main barriers are high labor and cost for manual disassembly, permanent bonding of complex multi-material constructions, and a lack of information about how products were built and how they should be processed. These barriers cannot be solved by a new seam or thread alone. They require coordinated decisions across design, sourcing, product architecture, and end-of-life operations.”
