Process

Fiberization

Frankenhuis has two Tearing lines, where all textiles are fiberized. Fiberization is pulling apart textile materials leaving a pile of fibres that can be used as a raw material for various downstream industries, such as automotive, non-woven and spinning. For fiberization, we work with different textile streams: post-consumer and post-industrial.

Post-consumer textiles are collected materials from households and professional laundering companies.
Unlike post-consumer textiles, post-industrial textiles have never been used. When talking about post-industrial textiles, you can think of production trimmings or products with quality defects.

Input materials for textile fiberization are selected mainly on the basis of structure over content. Large volumes are required for the fiberization process as it is an industrial process.

Grinding

Frankenhuis has a grinding process in house. The process of grinding is granulating textile materials into a small fraction. This small fraction is a fiber of about 2 mm which looks like powder. To transport the material, the powder is briquetted in a briquetting machine and placed into big bags.

The input materials in the grinding process are post-consumer or -industrial textiles. Almost all textiles can be grinded, most important is that the textiles are metal free.

Sorting

In our facility, we have a small sorting area. A sorting team is there sorting textiles on a daily basis. We do not sort household textiles as sorting companies do, we sort textiles from professional laundering companies. Frankenhuis receives two different streams from professional laundering companies that has to be sorted: workwear and linens, such as towels and bed linen. These streams are sorted into several fractions from which we extract valuable raw materials for our downstream processes.