In an industrial park in Zhangjiagang, a small city on China’s east coast, a large humming and hissing machine feeds on piles of used clothes and sorts them. The novelty? It uses artificial intelligence to sort them by composition at high speed, offering a glimpse into how AI could play a role in reducing the impact of synthetic textile waste. The Fastsort-Textile machine, named one of Time magazine’s Best Inventions of 2025, was created by DataBeyond, a Chinese AI recycling company founded in 2018. “We can make full use of textile waste and reduce the amount that is incinerated which…