A new pilot led by Avery Dennison in collaboration with textile circularity company ReCircled is demonstrating how RFID technology could fundamentally reshape the economics and scalability of fashion recycling, addressing long-standing barriers in garment identification, sorting speed and end-of-life traceability.
The initiative integrates UHF RFID tagging with automated scanning infrastructure and Avery Dennison’s digital product identity ecosystem, built around its connected product cloud platform. The system assigns each garment a unique digital identifier at the product level, enabling instant recognition throughout its lifecycle, including at end-of-life processing facilities where garments are typically sorted for resale, reuse or fibre recycling.
ReCircled operates in one of the most complex segments of the apparel value chain: post-consumer textile recovery. In its facilities, used garments arrive in large mixed volumes and must be sorted, deconstructed and routed into appropriate recovery streams. Historically, this process has relied heavily on manual labour, with workers required to inspect, classify and separate items based on brand, material composition and condition. As global textile waste volumes continue to rise, this labour-intensive model has become a critical constraint on scaling circular fashion systems.
The RFID pilot directly targets this bottleneck. By embedding RFID tags into garments during manufacturing or early supply chain stages, each item can later be identified automatically without the need for line-of-sight scanning. In practical terms, this allows bulk loads of garments to be scanned simultaneously, significantly reducing the time required for intake and classification at recycling and sorting centres.
According to findings from the deployment, RFID-enabled workflows delivered substantial efficiency improvements. In one operational scenario, labour required for scanning processes was reduced by up to 95.9 percent, while another configuration achieved reductions approaching 99.9 percent. These improvements stem from the ability of RFID readers to capture multiple tag identities at once, eliminating the sequential nature of barcode scanning or manual inspection.
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Accuracy also improved markedly. The system achieved identification accuracy of approximately 99 percent, compared with manual sorting accuracy estimates ranging from 72 percent to 89 percent depending on garment type and condition. This reduction in classification error is particularly significant for circular supply chains, where incorrect sorting can reduce the value of recovered materials or result in entire batches being downgraded for lower-value recycling applications.
At the core of the system is Avery Dennison’s digital infrastructure layer, which connects RFID identifiers to detailed product data within its atma.io platform. This creates a digital twin for each garment, linking physical items to data attributes such as material composition, manufacturing details and product history. When garments arrive at end-of-life facilities, this digital identity can be accessed instantly, allowing automated systems to determine the most appropriate recovery pathway.
The implications extend beyond operational efficiency in sorting facilities. One of the more commercially significant aspects of the pilot is its potential to enable duty drawback recovery. By tracking individual garments through export, destruction or recycling pathways, brands can generate verifiable documentation to support claims for reclaimed import duties on unsold or returned inventory. This introduces a financial incentive structure that positions circularity not only as a sustainability initiative but also as a cost-recovery mechanism.
Industry observers note that end-of-life textile processing has historically lacked reliable item-level traceability, making it difficult to verify material flows or optimize recycling outcomes. The introduction of RFID-based identification systems addresses this gap by embedding traceability at the point of production and maintaining it throughout the product lifecycle.
ReCircled’s role in the pilot focuses on industrial-scale textile recovery, where operational efficiency is directly tied to the speed and accuracy of intake processing. By reducing reliance on manual sorting, the RFID system enables higher throughput and more consistent classification, which is essential for scaling fibre-to-fibre recycling operations. The companies involved suggest that automation at this stage of the value chain is critical to making circular fashion economically viable at industrial levels.
The pilot also aligns with broader regulatory trends, particularly in Europe, where digital product passports and extended producer responsibility frameworks are expected to require brands to provide detailed information on product composition, origin and end-of-life handling. RFID-based digital identity systems offer a potential infrastructure layer to meet these emerging compliance requirements.
While the system is still in pilot stage, the results indicate that RFID could play a foundational role in transforming textile circularity from a fragmented, labour-intensive process into a data-driven industrial system. By enabling fast, accurate and automated garment identification, the technology addresses a structural bottleneck that has long limited the scalability of fashion recycling.
Avery Dennison positions this approach as part of a broader shift toward connected product ecosystems, where physical goods are continuously linked to digital data throughout their lifecycle. ReCircled, meanwhile, views automation and traceability as essential to increasing the volume and quality of recovered textiles.
Taken together, the pilot suggests that RFID may become a core infrastructure technology for the fashion industry’s transition toward circular business models, enabling both environmental and financial efficiencies at a scale that manual systems have struggled to achieve.
