On July 9, the final ranking was published, announcing the 16 projects selected for the City of Turin call “Culture and Entrepreneurship Rooted in the Circular Economy and Urban Fabric”, within the framework of the PN Metro Plus and Medium-Sized Cities South 2021–2027. Among the winning projects is RiTessiAMO, focused on the textile sector.

The partnership behind the project is composed of three local organisations with long-standing experience in the circular economy applied to the textile-fashion sector: the innovative startup with a social vocation Atelier Riforma as lead partner; the non-profit organisation ODV Società di San Vincenzo De Paoli, with its solidarity emporium ABITO; and DBT Fibre, through its recycling division Closeoop.

RiTessiAMO is a circular economy project that aims to give used textile products a new life and reduce waste in the fashion sector. It has two main objectives:

1. to activate the entire city ecosystem — companies, artisans, organisations and citizens — around the sustainable management of textile products;
2. to transform a Turin-based non-profit organisation active in the solidarity collection of clothing into a minimum-waste operating model.

The project will start with the creation, at ABITO, of an organised system to select textile products that cannot be donated but are suitable for recycling. With the support of Atelier Riforma and its technologies, materials will be sorted by fibre and colour and stripped of the elements that hinder recycling. The selected material will then be sent to DBT Fibre, in Biella, where it will be recycled into new fibres to be reintroduced into the market.

At the same time, ABITO and Atelier Riforma will activate a free service for the recovery and circular management of discarded textile products from local companies and organisations. The materials collected will be partly directed to a network of local artisans for reuse and upcycling activities, and partly enhanced through dedicated digital tools.

The project will also strengthen ABITO’s tailoring workshop, expanding garment repair and transformation activities and organising free courses and workshops open to the public.

Another key component will be awareness-raising on responsible consumption in fashion, through meetings in schools, events, workshops and information campaigns. Free training and consultancy activities will also be offered to companies, professionals and students in the fashion sector, with the aim of spreading eco-design practices and more sustainable textile management.

“This is a truly pioneering project: there appear to be no similar experiences in which a non-profit organisation dedicated to the solidarity collection of clothes has access to advanced technologies — such as a NIR spectroscopy reader for fibre identification and an Artificial Intelligence technology for the digitalisation and automatic sale of garments on a marketplace — combined with a staff of trained volunteers able to prepare textiles unsuitable for reuse for fibre-to-fibre recycling. Such equipment has so far been the prerogative of large industrial operators” — Elisa Valenti, coordinator of ABITO.

Today, used clothes collected through donations or street collection are mainly valorised through reuse. However, an increasing share is not suitable for reuse due to the poor quality of garments, largely linked to the spread of fast fashion. These materials therefore end up in low-value recovery processes, such as the production of rags and padding, or are disposed of or incinerated.

“Fibre-to-fibre recycling, which makes it possible to regenerate new fibres from textile waste, is still not widespread, especially for post-consumer textiles, because it requires materials to be carefully sorted by composition and colour and the removal of elements such as buttons and zips. For this reason, today less than 1% of textiles are actually recycled into new fibres” — Federico De Martini, CEO of DBT Fibre.

Moreover, textile sorting and preparation activities are complex and manual, and are therefore often carried out abroad, resulting in a supply chain that is inefficient from both an economic and environmental point of view. This is why the European Union is promoting the development of more local and circular systems for collection, sorting and recycling, capable of reducing waste, costs and environmental impacts.

“By enhancing local skills, the circular model of RiTessiAMO will be almost zero-kilometre — collection, sorting, disassembly, recycling and spinning will take place within 80 km. In a highly globalised and opaque supply chain such as that of post-consumer textiles, this is an extremely ambitious goal, creating for Turin and Piedmont an international best practice case” — Elena Ferrero, CEO of Atelier Riforma.

The project will have a total budget of just under €125,000 and will run over 10 months, from September 2026 to June 2027.

The activities planned within RiTessiAMO were announced on July 2 during a talk at Torino Fashion Week 2026, the annual international event dedicated to the fashion sector held in the Piedmontese capital.