Igers Opens €8m Integrated Textile Recycling Plant in Northern Italy

Italian recycling company Igers has opened an €8 million integrated textile recycling plant in San Pietro Mosezzo, near Novara, northern Italy. The facility, launched on 21 September, processes four tons per hour of post-consumer and post-industrial textile waste into recovered fibres and shredded material for the spinning industry.

Italy's National Recovery and Resilience Plan co-financed €1.3 million of the investment. Stadler, the German sorting technology specialist, acted as engineering and technology partner, working from initial process design through to final plant layout. According to the companies, this is the first facility in Italy to integrate all main recycling stages — sorting, sanitisation and mechanical fibre recovery — within a single operation.

Why integration matters

The plant is built around a patented Igers process combining contaminant removal, automated material identification and separation, mechanical recycling and digital traceability. The target is a known obstacle: discarded textiles vary widely in composition, containing fibre blends, accessories and contaminants that complicate recovery.

"The distinctive value of our process lies in the integration of impurity separation, technology-based material sorting, mechanical regeneration and digital traceability," Igers CEO Gian Luca Miceli said. "We do not consider these stages as isolated activities – they are parts of a single system that enables more accurate decisions to be made about the destination of each material stream."

How does the sorting line work?

Stadler integrated equipment from several suppliers into a fully automated line comprising two dosing units, two near-infrared (NIR) optical sorters supplied by Tomra, and 16 conveyors feeding downstream recycling equipment in a continuous flow.

Sorting runs in two stages:

• A first NIR sorter separates pure materials, including 100% cotton and wool, from blended textiles and impurities. Higher-value pure fractions go to temporary storage.
• A second NIR sorter removes non-textile materials, including leather and hanger fragments, from the remaining stream.

Stored materials are then recirculated, with the NIR systems reconfigured to sort by fibre composition. This lets Igers adapt sorting strategy as input materials and market requirements change. Recovered fractions route to baling, storage, recirculation or fibre-opening equipment depending on composition and end use. The line needs one operator to supervise and adjust optical settings.

What made textiles difficult to automate?

Textile waste behaves very differently from the rigid packaging that automated sorting plants usually handle. Textiles are flexible, irregularly shaped and prone to folding, overlapping and tangling during conveying and separation — properties that directly affect throughput and sorting accuracy.

"Textiles present very specific handling challenges," Stadler project manager Matteo Zaninelli said. "They are soft and flexible, come in many different shapes and sizes and can fold, overlap or become entangled."

Stadler ran extensive trials at its test centre with Igers to configure feeding, dosing, conveying and distribution. Attention focused on dosing unit positioning and distribution hopper design to stabilise material flow. "These may seem like relatively small details, but they have a significant impact on the stability of the material flow and therefore on the performance of the entire sorting process," Zaninelli said. The project also required close coordination between equipment suppliers to run the stages reliably within an existing industrial building.

Regulatory backdrop and expansion plans

The opening lands as the European textile industry builds industrial-scale recycling capacity under mandatory separate textile waste collection and new extended producer responsibility requirements.

Igers intends to use San Pietro Mosezzo as the base for a wider Italian network, with further sites dependent on waste availability, regional requirements and demand for recovered materials. "Our objective is to consolidate San Pietro Mosezzo as a leading industrial and technological platform," Miceli said. "Building on this foundation, we intend to progressively develop additional recycling hubs."

For Stadler, the project extends established automated sorting technology into textiles. Zaninelli noted the challenge goes beyond separation: downstream recycling operations need a consistent feedstock supply at the required quality. Additional hubs will depend on whether waste volumes and recovered-fibre demand justify the next round of investment.