A pilot project between Avery Dennison and circular fashion specialist ReCircled has delivered some of the most compelling evidence yet that RFID technology can transform end-of-life garment processing. The results show near-perfect sorting accuracy, labour reductions of up to 99.9%, and an economic case strong enough to offset the cost of implementation.
ReCircled, headquartered in Denver, Colorado, designs and runs circular programs for apparel and footwear brands. The company takes in end-of-life garments, breaks them down by removing components like buttons and zippers, and processes the fabric into raw fibres for reuse. As demand for these services grows, the manual identification and sorting of incoming items has become a significant bottleneck, slowing throughput and introducing errors that reduce the value recovered from each batch.
To address this, ReCircled partnered with Avery Dennison to run a side-by-side comparison of manual sorting against an RFID-enabled workflow. The solution combined Avery Dennison’s embedded UHF RFID sensor technology, compatible RFID hardware, and the atma.io connected product cloud platform. Together, these components assign a unique digital identity to each garment, allowing automated capture of product data throughout the item’s lifecycle.
The pilot involved two major global apparel brands, and the efficiency gains were striking. For one brand, RFID scanning reduced the labour hours needed for product identification by 95.9%. For the other, the reduction was 99.9%. At the same time, accuracy jumped to 99% across the board, compared to manual accuracy rates of just 89% and 72% for the two brands respectively.
Beyond speed and accuracy, the RFID system captured richer data for every garment, including Electronic Product Codes (EPC) and material weight information. This additional detail proved particularly valuable for external reporting and for unlocking revenue streams that manual processes cannot efficiently support. One key example is Duty Drawback compensation, where brands can reclaim duties on damaged or unsold goods returned for recycling. With RFID, individual items can be tracked and documented at a fraction of the traditional labour cost, making single-item Duty Drawback claims practical for the first time.
The economic conclusions were clear. The savings from faster, more accurate processing, combined with newly accessible value streams like Duty Drawback, were enough to more than offset the initial investment in RFID infrastructure. For brands already tagging products at the point of manufacture, the incremental cost of enabling circular sorting is minimal.
Scott Kuhlman, CEO of ReCircled, said the technology is already reshaping operations: “RFID allows us to instantly identify hundreds of items, minimising manual labour, reducing errors, and is the key to unlocking full automation.”
The remaining challenge is adoption at scale. For RFID-enabled circularity to reach its full potential, brands need to embed digital identities into garments at the point of manufacture. That foundational step ensures every product is equipped for sorting, recycling, resale, or other end-of-life pathways from day one.
Read more at https://apparelsolutions.averydennison.com/en/perspectives/recircled-case-study