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Once carbonised, clothes are washed and shredded using repurposed paper machines. Water is then recycled and reused among the consortium. Among the fabrics that are sorted, wool is the most common and successfully recycled textile. In Prato, Italy, this industry is a historical tradition. A law in the early 1900s prohibiting the importation of raw wool promoted the rise of a district in this small tuscan city where today dozens of companies sort and recycle over 15% of all the world?s textiles with a market value of 2.5 billion $. According to Ellen Mac Arthur Foundation of 100 million of tonnes of textile waste produced every year, only 1% is recycled. Of what arrives here some goes to resale in Africa (60%), some gets recycled (37%), while a minor amount needs to go into incineration (3%). An important and the most difficult part of what goes on in Prato is the selection and the sorting of textile by colour ? some warehouses are stacked with colours that have been out of fashion for more than 40 years, and stored waiting for the market to be ready for a specific hue. Once the clothes are sorted in colour, a wet shredding technique derived from paper recycling is used to wash and strip the wool with water that is shared and reused among the many facilities in the Prato area. This is the only active carboniser in the world: a cylinder in which vaporised Hydrochloric acid burns away cellulose and contaminants such as cotton stitches that could otherwise compromise the quality of the recycled wool. After washing and purification, the shredded wool is dried and sent to facilities for spinning and turned into threads. While this procedure has been happening for nearly two centuries, only in recent years these entrepreneurs could start to declare the recycled nature of their wool. What was considered a dirty discarded item is today a commodity and a symbol for sustainable industrial production.