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From Fabric to Data: How Material Scanning Enhances Textile Recycling
Material passports, precise sorting, and circular design as keys to a sustainable textile economy
By Sarah Frank, Hochschule Reutlingen – Technikwirtschaft-Informatik-Design (Germany), 22 September 2025
Our world is full of fabrics, in every sense of the word. From clothing to furniture to industrial textiles, we produce and consume billions of tons of materials each year. Yet only a small fraction ever finds its way back into the cycle. The rest ends up in landfills or incinerators.
One key reason: the essential information about the material, its composition, structure, and surface treatment, is often lost. This is where a quiet revolution begins: the digital scanning of textiles.
What Is a Material Scan?
A modern material scanner does not merely take a photograph, but creates a photorealistic, physically accurate digital twin of a fabric. High-end devices reach resolutions of up to around 2000 dpi, using high-resolution cameras and multi-point lighting systems to produce PBR maps (Physically Based Rendering maps). This process typically takes only 1-3 minutes per fabric sample.
The scanner produces several maps that together digitally represent the material in full detail. These maps allow realistic simulation of light-material interaction in digital environments. Tools provide automatic tiling to ensure seamless texture repeats – essential for 3D designs and configurators. Export formats such as U3M or SBS allow seamless integration into CAD, PLM, and design platforms.
Visualization vs. Simulation: Why Physical Properties Matter
While scanning captures visual and surface characteristics, it does not describe how a fabric actually behaves. For that, physical properties such as tensile strength, elasticity, density, or breaking elongation must also be measured.
Visualization is based on scanning: it ensures that fabrics look authentic in digital environments.
Simulation relies on physical properties: it determines whether a garment drapes softly, stretches, or resists tearing. Without these inputs, a digital model may look real but move in ways no textile ever would.
This distinction also matters for recycling. Physical values determine which process — mechanical shredding, chemical dissolution, or thermal treatment — is effective.
Only by combining scanning with physical properties can a digital material passport support both realistic product development and sustainable end-of-life processing.
Development Potential Through Digitization
Digitization streamlines development by enabling designers to access complete digital twins in minutes, test prototypes virtually, and integrate results directly into CAD or PLM systems. Standardized export ensures consistency, while future AI workflows may fully automate cataloging and linking of both appearance scans and physical measurements.
This dual dataset, visualization plus material behavior, allows designers to work faster, manufacturers to reduce waste, and recyclers to plan precise material recovery.
Why Is This Important for Recycling?
Digital material passports make it possible to sort end-of-life textiles not only by fiber composition but also by their structural and physical properties. Automated systems can thus direct cotton blends, polyester fibers, or coated textiles into the most effective recycling stream. This improves the purity of recovered fractions, increases process efficiency, and reduces contamination.
At the same time, material libraries let designers deliberately integrate recycled fibers into new products, anchoring circular design principles early in the process.
Connected Material Libraries
Digitalized materials can be stored and shared across industries. When both appearance scans and physical data are available in common libraries, designers, manufacturers, and recyclers all work with the same reliable foundation, ensuring traceability and consistency across the entire product life cycle.
Conclusion
Material scans deliver high-quality digital twins that make textiles visible, shareable, and usable in virtual product development. But true impact comes from linking them with physical property data. Visualization depends on appearance scans, while recycling and realistic product behavior rely on physical measurements. Together, they close the loop between design, production, and circular reuse – paving the way to a sustainable textile economy, starting with a single scan.
