From the Sector

Teijin Carbon Europe GmbH announces an important change in its executive leadership. Effective October 1, 2025, Dr. Bernd Wohlmann will step down from his role as CEO after seven successful years leading the company.

Dr. Wohlmann has played a key role in shaping the development of Teijin Carbon Europe. Under his leadership, the company has achieved significant milestones and navigated through challenging times with resilience and strategic foresight. Discussions regarding his future role within the Teijin Group are currently ongoing.

Moving forward, Takaya Miyano and Jörg Friedrich will continue to lead Teijin Carbon Europe as Managing Directors. 

Teijin Carbon, a subsidiary of the Teijin Group, specializes in the development and production of carbon fibers and carbon fiber-based materials. Under the brands Tenax™ and Tenax Next™, Teijin Carbon offers high-performance material solutions for industries such as aerospace, automotive, energy, electronics, civil engineering and sporting goods.

At K 2025, the Reifenhäuser Group will demonstrate Industrial AI's full potential for productivity in plastics processing. At the heart of the dedicated “Reifenhäuser NEXT” brand is a powerful AI chatbot that enables even inexperienced line operators to quickly solve complex tasks in their daily work, thereby maximizing availability, productivity, and quality.

In Germany, 86 percent of companies are affected by the shortage of skilled workers – more than twice as many as ten years ago. The global average is currently 74 percent*. Production companies rank fifth in the industry comparison. The low availability and high turnover of experienced production specialists is one of the biggest challenges facing the plastics industry. *Source: MPG study on the shortage of skilled workers in 2025

With Reifenhäuser NEXT, plastics manufacturers can reduce their dependence on highly qualified personnel and increase their overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) by optimizing availability, performance, and quality. This is made possible by a unique ecosystem that combines state-of-the-art AI technologies with Reifenhäuser's proven expertise and live data from production.

"Google, OpenAI, and others are already impressively demonstrating what AI solutions can achieve in the consumer sector. However, AI is only as intelligent as the data it has been trained with,“ explains Jan Karnath, Chief Digital Officer (CDO) of the Reifenhäuser Group and responsible for the NEXT brand. ”Reifenhäuser has decades of experience in plastics extrusion. We have integrated this bundled knowledge into an AI solution that is unique on the market."

The Reifenhäuser NEXT portfolio is based on three product streams that seamlessly interlock:

NEXT.AI – Intelligent assistance systems 
At the heart of NEXT.AI is an AI chatbot that provides real-time support to machine operators and service teams during ongoing operations. The AI accesses Reifenhäuser's comprehensive expertise in engineering, service, maintenance, and process technology – and, if desired, on the user's documentation and live production data. Operators receive immediately actionable recommendations via simple text entries (prompts) in the chatbot – for example, in the event of quality problems. Thanks to this support, even inexperienced employees can achieve optimal results. This reduces downtime, lowers service costs, and makes production processes more efficient.

“Our assistance systems act as constant companions for the production teams. They not only provide quick solutions to problems, but will also deliver proactive alerts and optimization suggestions in the future,” says Karnath.

NEXT.Learning – Knowledge as the key to success 
To build up and establish the necessary expertise among plastics processors in the long term, NEXT.Learning offers a combination of on-site training and a digital learning platform. This is individually tailored to the needs of customers and helps producers to retain expertise within the company despite staff turnover and make it available to new employees at any time. Thanks to the use of AI avatars, customers can access the virtual training courses in over 100 languages. On request, Reifenhäuser NEXT can also adapt and provide content very quickly to meet customer-specific requirements.

“By using natural language processing (NLP), we are democratizing specialist knowledge for our global customer base in a whole new dimension. Initial pilot projects have generated extremely positive feedback and highlight the added value of our solution – especially for international customers whose production employees speak different local languages and, for example, do not have sufficient English skills,” explains Karnath.

NEXT.Data – Generating added value from data 
The third product stream, NEXT.Data, enables producers to exploit the full potential of their production data. The data is automatically aggregated via robust system integrations (e.g., OPC UA or GraphQL) and displayed in clear dashboards using the ExtrusionOS application suite. ExtrusionOS is specially designed for the requirements of the plastics extrusion and packaging industry. Among other things, customers can use it to create real-time analyses and automated OEE calculations to make data-driven decisions.

“With Reifenhäuser NEXT Product Streams, we provide our customers with a customized industrial AI journey. Depending on their requirements, we combine our NEXT.AI, Learning, and Data solutions, select the appropriate level of integration, and thus create the basis for operational excellence in line operation,” explains Karnath.

Recent studies show that the use of Industrial AI offers considerable potential for increasing overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) – with improvements of up to 15 percent. Among other things, this is made possible by reducing downtime and waste by up to 20 percent*. In addition, cost savings are expected in the area of maintenance, which can be achieved through optimized service and spare parts planning. Reifenhäuser NEXT focuses on precisely this area and supports companies in integrating the use of AI into industrial production in a targeted manner in order to fully exploit this potential and achieve sustainable improvements. 
*Source: McKinsey / Deloitte

Anton Hofmeier has joined the Textile Solutions Group (TSG) as Group CEO, effective 1 September 2025. His appointment strengthens Group-level coordination and aligns strategy from ERP and CAD to MES and shop-floor automation, so textile manufacturers achieve faster, lower-risk improvements in processing cost, delivery reliability, and sustainability.

Anton Hofmeier is an enterprise-software executive with 20+ years of experience in revenue growth, market expansion and M&A integration. With electronic-engineering roots and recent global supply-chain leadership, he brings an operations-first mindset that matches mill reality: complex flows, short lead times and last-minute reorders, right-first-time pressure, and the need to make quick decisions on reliable, connected data - without losing the strengths of each specialist company.

This comes at a time when mills face higher energy and material costs, stricter ESG requirements and global uncertainty, while many machines and supply systems still depend on manual handoffs or disconnected systems. Under Anton’s leadership, TSG’s goal is practical: shorter order-to-ship cycles, higher right-first-time, lower kWh per lot, and audit-ready traceability, enabled by a connected stack spanning product design, planning & sourcing, production & maintenance, quality controls and shipment.

• Proprietary Borstar® Nextension polyethylene (PE) technology delivers superior performance and processability, enables downgauging and design for recycling – meeting the evolving demands of flexible packaging applications
• Borealis introduces development materials with superior toughness and sealability
• This marks the launch of a dynamic innovation pipeline across industries

Borealis proudly unveils its groundbreaking Borstar® Nextension Polyethylene (PE) technology, representing a significant leap forward in polyolefin innovation. 

Building on the proven performance of Borstar® technology, the new Borstar Nextension PE platform incorporates proprietary single-site catalysts developed by Borealis. This breakthrough technology marks a new era in advanced polyethylene solutions, delivering superior toughness, sealing performance, and enhanced processability for packaging solutions that enable downgauging, improve cost efficiency, and support design for recycling—addressing the critical needs of today’s packaging industry.

Borstar Nextension PE technology sets new standards by enabling mono-material solutions that can replace existing multimaterial products, thus making it easier to sort and recycle at the end of life. Crucially, this supports the packaging industry to meet the recycling and waste reduction targets set out in the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR). 

“This technological step change paves the way for more circular, high-performance, and resource-efficient packaging solutions,” says Erik Van Praet, Senior Vice President Innovation & Technology at Borealis. “It underscores our strategic commitment to sustainable innovation, driven by continuous investment in cutting-edge research and development.”

Introducing next-generation development materials
Borealis introduces Borstar Nextension PE technology with two high-performance development materials, tailored to meet evolving market needs:

• A cutting-edge solution that delivers double the toughness of first-generation metallocene PE materials, while maintaining stiffness and excellent processability, including superior bubble stability and throughput. With its unique mechanical performance and strong downgauging potential, this new material enables more sustainable, fully recyclable packaging with excellent performance characteristics. Designed for industrial and food packaging applications, it is ideally suited for Form, Fill & Seal (FFS) and frozen food packaging.
• An advanced solution featuring a breakthrough sealing profile that reduces sealing initiation temperature by over 15% compared to first generation metallocene PE. This, in combination with the material’s outstanding mechanical properties, enables faster packaging speeds, best-in-class hot tack performance – making it perfectly suited for lamination, FFS, and food packaging.

“Borstar Nextension PE technology will expand our portfolio with highly efficient and recyclable solutions,” adds Craig Arnold, Executive Vice President Polyolefins, Circular Economy Solutions and Base Chemicals. “This is just the beginning of a robust innovation pipeline that will serve customer needs across multiple industries.”

On the occasion of New York Climate Week, Global Fashion Agenda (GFA) has launched the Fashion CEO Agenda 2025, a strategic resource for leaders of fashion brands and retailers, designed to guide immediate action to future-proof businesses while advancing towards a net-positive fashion industry by 2050.

Published at a pivotal mid-decade reflection point - with less than five years remaining to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals and scientists warning of only three years left to alter the trajectory of global warming - the report comes as the industry faces turbulence, from economic volatility and deregulation to escalating climate and social crises.

The updated agenda urges executives to take action according to its long-standing five-priority sustainability framework - Respectful and Secure Work Environments, Better Wage Systems, Resource Stewardship, Smart Material Choices, and Circular Systems. For the first time, the 2025 edition introduces Priority Accelerators: Innovation, Capital, Courage, Incentives, and Regulation. These build on the themes discussed at Global Fashion Summit: Copenhagen Edition this year, positioned as critical levers that cut across all five priorities, enabling systemic change at speed and scale.

The Fashion CEO Agenda 2025 is structured in two clear parts: Part one presents overarching ambitions for the fashion sector that demand collective action across stakeholders, while part two outlines the immediate, short-term, practical steps brands and retailers can take today to advance those ambitions.

The 2025 edition builds upon the ambitions first presented in the 2023 Fashion CEO Agenda which were developed through years of stakeholder engagement and validated by GFA and the UN Environment Programme’s global Fashion Industry Target Consultation. Two years on, these ambitions remain central to industry-wide progress. For 2025, they’ve been re-evaluated in consultation with leading multi-stakeholder initiatives and experts to ensure continued ambition, impact, and relevance. The scope now expands to further urgent priorities such as fair and ethical treatment of migrant workers and empowering workers through inclusive automation and reskilling, with a firm focus on the need for transformation that benefits both the planet and its communities.

To support implementation, GFA has also released new complementary materials including a practical toolkit guiding companies to credible existing industry tools, guidelines, and programmes, as well as a presentation deck that fashion leaders can adapt internally to educate teams. These resources are designed to help leaders embed the Fashion CEO Agenda into company strategies and communicate it effectively throughout their organisations.

Federica Marchionni, CEO of Global Fashion Agenda, said: “Climate change is the defining certainty in an uncertain global world, impacting all lives and communities. The investments needed to future-proof businesses will keep increasing and the cost of inaction will inevitably become greater than the investments needed to address it. This year’s Fashion CEO Agenda provides leaders with a clear path to embed sustainability at the heart of corporate strategy, supported by enabling conditions that make bold action both possible and necessary.”

Through a planned programme of continuous expansion, including ongoing projects aimed at resource efficiency and environmental excellence, Spain’s Textil A. Ortiz has reinforced its position as one of Europe’s leading suppliers of premium quality lining fabrics.

The company, which celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2024, has just successfully commissioned a fourth Monforts Montex stenter at its plant in Santa Perpètua de Mogoda, 25 kilometres north of Barcelona. This is one of three plants operated by the company, with a second nearby in Catalonia and a third in Valencia. Its relationship with Monforts and local representative Aguilar & Pineda dates back to the 1970s.

Trusted supplier
The new Montex line is being employed to finish fabrics with softeners, water repellents and flame retardants and is already achieving significant cost savings. Linings are stocked in more than 1,000 colours with special finishing options for customers and a large database of designs and prints.

The new nine-chamber Montex 8500-9F with a nominal width of 200cm is equipped with direct gas heating, a Hercules needle chain, a Matex finishing padder and two heat exchangers. In combination with heat recovery, a Monformatic Professional measuring and control system enables energy consumption to be fully minimised and reproducible fabric quality to be constantly achieved.

No water discharge
“The installation of a water treatment plant working through evaporation and condensation further allows us to be the first dyeing and finishing company that does not discharge water into the public sewerage system,” says Textil A. Ortiz Manager Abel Ortiz. 

The company has also recently invested in a major installation of new circular knitting machines and expanded with the production of lining fabrics based on recycled polyester, while 15,000 square metres of photovoltaic panels and two wind turbines now supply the Santa Perpètua de Mogoda plant with 100% green energy.

Developed by Stanford researchers, NeuroString is a hair-thin multichannel biosensor and stimulator with promising potential applications in drug delivery, nerve stimulation, smart fabrics, and more.
 

• NeuroString is a small, soft fiber that is made of skin-like material and can host hundreds to thousands of electronic channels.
• The hope is that NeuroString could be implanted in the body to sense chemicals, deliver drugs, stimulate muscles or nerves, and monitor bodily activity.
• Outside the body, this invention could enable new smart fabrics, wearable devices, and soft robotics. It could also enhance study of lab-grown tissues.
• So far, researchers have used NeuroString to monitor the intestines of a pig and to observe individual neurons in the brain of a mouse.

Stanford pediatric surgeon James Dunn specializes in helping children with short gut syndrome, a congenital disease in which children are born with short intestinal tracts. “I’ve been working to grow new intestinal tissue by applying a mechanical force to the intestine – stretching it,” Dunn, who is a professor of surgery in the School of Medicine, explained. “But I didn’t have a way to demonstrate that this new tissue is functioning exactly like normal intestine.”

That is when Dunn reached out to Zhenan Bao, the K.K. Lee Professor of Chemical Engineering and director of the Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiative (eWEAR), who has drawn worldwide attention for developing skinlike electrical circuits, like her electronic skin that can sense the weight of a butterfly and the heat of a flame. The result of their collaboration is NeuroString, a multichannel, soft, thread-like implantable biosensor/stimulator.

NeuroString is just a quarter of a millimeter in diameter – about the width of a human hair – and can host hundreds to thousands of independent electronic “channels,” each of which can sense neurochemicals, stimulate muscle or nerve, sense gut movement patterns, or monitor the activity of a single neuron, among many other promising possibilities. 

Unmet needs
“There is great need, in both research and clinical settings, for these minimally invasive sensing and stimulation bioelectronics,” said co-author Xiang Qian, co-director of Stanford’s eWear Initiative and a medical doctor who specializes in neuromodulation to treat severe pain. Currently, clinical tools boil down to rigid and bulky needlelike probes or stiff wires with limited functionality.

“It is a high-density electronic fiber that’s also exceptionally biocompatible due to its softness,” Qian said. “It can stay inside the body for months at a time or longer, and it’s so soft and small that it can be implanted without discomfort or harm to the patient.”

Beyond the thin and soft circuitry, Bao’s team also developed a clever roll-up fabrication technique. They prepared a video of the method that shows a prototype with 20 electronic channels laid out on a thin, transparent skin-like material. The film is then rolled tightly into a spindle so thin it is described as one-dimensional. All 20 electrical connecting wires in the example are spiraled inside the string, like the layers in a Swiss roll, while the 20 sensors are exposed on the surface. Each independent sensor/stimulator is connected by a discrete wire running the length of the NeuroString to deliver valuable data.

Bao said the approach allows exquisite control of the positioning and distribution of the active components, and her team has demonstrated a fiber with a remarkable 1,280 individual channels. “Many more channels can be added if we make longer fibers,” says Muhammad Khatib, a postdoctoral fellow and first author on the paper.

New frontiers
On a practical front, to demonstrate the effectiveness of their new electronic fiber, Bao, Dunn, and team used the implanted NeuroString to monitor the intestines of a pig and to observe individual neurons in the brain of a mouse over four months.

Dunn explained that, in his field, measuring basic things like how the intestine contracts without interrupting normal activities may sound easy, but it has so far been out of reach, not to mention that the intestine also does a lot of things like absorbing nutrients and secreting biochemicals like serotonin that he might want to track.

“To be able to stimulate the muscle and measure all these other things in a specific region will be transformative for my research and, potentially, my medical practice – NeuroString is a platform for us to understand how the intestine works,” Dunn said.
 
The research team anticipates that such devices could have far-reaching impacts in fields ranging from neuroscience to gastroenterology. They envision that it could yield robotic pills that can be swallowed to diagnose medical conditions throughout the gastrointestinal tract or be wrapped around an optical fiber to create an ultra-thin endoscope.

Qian thinks NeuroString could introduce an era of minimally invasive, closed-loop neural stimulation techniques – devices that can both sense nerve dysfunction and intervene in an instant. “You only need to stimulate when you detect this abnormal electric signal to shut it down,” Qian said of his device, which he is currently testing in mice. “It will be ten times smaller than conventional alternatives and much safer with fewer complications. It would be groundbreaking.”

In a tubelike form, Bao says the NeuroString could deliver drugs to precise locations inside the body. Imagine a new form of implantable insulin pump that both senses blood sugar and delivers the life-sustaining hormone on demand, much like the pancreas.

In brain studies, NeuroString could deliver light for optogenetics and sense its effect on local neurons to optimize light intensity. And these potential applications are only the in-body opportunities for NeuroString. In other practical outlets, Bao said, NeuroString might lead to a new era of smart fabrics and textiles, wearable devices, and soft robotics.

Synthetic organs
One area of research that Bao finds particularly intriguing is organoids – lab-grown tissues that function like real tissue for use in research. Her team, together with Xiaoke Chen, associate professor of biology in the School of Humanities and Sciences, initially developed a NeuroString with only one neurochemical sensor seeded by Bio-X seed funding. The team’s initial development of this advanced NeuroString came under the aegis of the Brain Organogenesis Big Ideas in Neuroscience program at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.

The Brain Organogenesis program is pursuing new models of human brain circuits to understand how the brain develops and what is happening when things go wrong, as in numerous neurological and psychiatric diseases from depression to Parkinson’s disease. Bao said her NeuroString technology was inspired by the need for soft sensors that can be embedded inside the growing organoids that will allow researchers deeper insights into the function and biochemistry of these lab-grown mini-organlike structures to mimic human tissues.

“We hope to thread these thin electronics inside and throughout organoids, to promote and monitor their growth,” Bao said. “That’s our vision and it’s pretty exciting.”

As technical apparel hits the streets, the mountain-focused Swiss brand Mammut is making a statement: mountain wear is for the peaks, not for the pavements! The twist? How they’re backing it up. 

Responding to the trend of overusing shell jackets, puffers, and other outdoor-engineered clothing as fashion or statement pieces, Mammut’s Fall/Winter 25/26 campaign is set to provoke debate, with ad spots already calling out “mountainwear misuse” on the streets of London. The response? The community both loves and hates it, filling comment threads with discussion over just where technical mountainwear truly belongs. 

But the campaign has only just begun. After releasing the Mission Impossible-style edit shot in London, the Mountainwear Misuse Advisory Panel (aka Mammut´s Marketing Department) returned to Switzerland to create a mockumentary skit series featuring Canadian comedian and influencer Katie Burrell as both talent and director.  

The creative was shot at Mammut Headquarters in Seon and in downtown Zürich. Joining Katie were renowned Mammut athletes Jakob Schubert and Lindsey Hamm, along with influencers Jannick Apitz and Tegan Phillips. 
It’s the lead-up to the final act: making it real. Mammut is pleased to add real-world mountain enthusiasts Cara Nemelka and Marius Isman to the Mountainwear Misuse Ranger team.   

The rangers will make it real by taking the newly formed team to Munich’s Oktoberfest, where puffy jackets and shells are sure to adorn the shoulders of revelers who are definitely not headed to the mountains. 

Of course, the mission to curb Mountainwear Misuse comes straight from the top — Mammut CEO Heiko Schäfer has weighed in on the topic:

“After years of exile on city sidewalks, Mammut’s mountaineering apparel is finally being liberated. Thanks to Mountainwear Rescue, down jackets and hardshells are being returned to where they truly belong: glaciers, granite, and into occasional snowstorms. Let’s face it – a hardshell jacket doesn’t dream of espresso foam; it dreams of powder snow, and Gore-Tex wasn’t invented to protect you from latte spills!” 

The Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation (TIDCO) and the Institut für Textiltechnik (ITA) of RWTH Aachen University are planning to cooperate in the future in the field of AI-supported manufacturing, robotics and smart textiles. At the same time, the aim is to promote talent exchange and a sustainable Indian-German partnership.

The memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed during the Tamil Nadu Rising Investment Conclave in Düsseldorf. M. K. Stalin, Chief Minister of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and high-ranking representatives from government and industry were present at the signing.

The aim of the partnership is to create an open innovation ecosystem that combines dynamic industry with Germany's excellent research. This partnership is strongly supported by Guidance Tamil Nadu and Hon. Dr TRB Rajaa, Minister for Industry, Investment Promotion and Trade of the Government of Tamil Nadu.

Thiru V. Arun Roy, I.A.S., Principal Secretary, Department of Industry, Government of Tamil Nadu, exchanged the MoU on behalf of Sandeep Nanduri, I.A.S., Managing Director, TIDCO.

Dr Akram Idrissi, Head of Strategy & Business Development at ITA, exchanged the MoU on behalf of ITA Director Prof. Dr Thomas Gries.

Currently, PVC-based and polyurethane-based artificial leathers dominate the market. The manufacturing processes are energy- and cost-intensive. In addition, plasticizers and solvents that are harmful to health are used. Coatings with thermoplastic elastomers (TPE) offer an alternative. The TPE group combines the advantage of thermoplastic processability with elasticity and dynamic behaviour that is almost as high as that of cross-linked, thermosetting elastomers. The polymers should be applied using energyefficient and environmentally friendly hot melt roller application and slot die technology. In order to achieve specific properties, such as colour, appearance, or flame retardancy, the incorporation of appropriate additives was part of the investigations. 

The research project focused on applying the polymers using energy-efficient and environmentally friendly hot melt roller coating and wide slot die technology. In addition, appropriate additives were incorporated into the TPEs for supplementary investigations in order to obtain specific properties such as colour, appearance or flame retardancy. 
 
In this research project, various thermoplastic polyurethanes were successfully applied to different textiles using direct and transfer coating processes involving roller application and slot die. Transfer coating using roller application was found to be the most suitable method for use as artificial leather. Various additives were successfully incorporated into the TPUs to achieve a range of colours and optical effects. Fabrics (PES, CO/PES), knitted fabrics (PES), spacer fabrics (PES), nonwovens (PES multiknit and needle punched) and TPU meltblown were used as textile carrier materials. This made it possible to achieve different thicknesses in the range between 0.6 mm and 4.7 mm in combination with application weights of 100 g/m² to 200 g/m². The more voluminous textiles were used to produce pressure-elastic artificial leather (soft-touch effect). Soft, flexible, stretchable TPU-based artificial leathers were developed, which are characterized by high abrasion resistance (> 100.000 abrasion cycles) and permanent bend resistance (> 50.000 bends). The coloured TPU synthetic leathers showed high colour fastness to rubbing with a rating of 4-5. From today's perspective, potential areas of application for the manufactured materials include synthetic leather for bag goods, home textiles, and the automotive sector. 
 
Dr. Ralf Lungwitz, Manager Functionalisation, who led the INNO-KOM project is convinced: “Thermoplastic elastomer coatings as artificial leather are a good alternative material because they have excellent properties for use in demanding applications. We were impressed by their high mechanical strength.”