“You have a bag of heavily used clothes that can no longer be donated taking up space in your closet, so you drop it off at your local recycling center. But what happens to that bag of clothes? You might assume that the clothes would get broken down and reused to make new products. https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2025/01/nist-database-can-help-increase-recycling-textiles-and-clothing However, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in 2018 around 85% of used clothes and textiles headed to landfills and incinerators, wasting precious resources and polluting our environment. One reason is that recycling can be more expensive than landfilling, so companies have little incentive to recycle. To help solve this problem, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a database that contains the molecular “fingerprints” of different kinds of textile fibers and that can enable more rapid, efficient sorting of fabrics at recycling centers. “This reference data will help improve sorting algorithms and unlock the potential for high-throughput sorting, which requires less manual labor,” said Amanda Forster, a NIST materials research engineer. Forster leads the NIST project focused on keeping end-of-life textiles in the economy, a process called textile circularity. “That should reduce costs and increase efficiency, making textile recycling more economically viable.” The database is free and available to download at the NIST Public Data Repository.”