From the Sector

“Grow Your Couture” by Piero D'angelo, the winning project of the IMAGINING SUSTAINABLE FASHION (ISFA) competition was announced during a webinar broadcast on 18 May attended by Giusy Bettoni CEO of C.L.A.S.S. Eco Hub, Anna Detheridge President of Connecting Cultures and ISFA ambassadors Valentina Suarez, co-founder and CEO of Universo Mola and Vishal Tolambia winner of the 2022 edition.
 
Piero D'angelo's project was the best among the 110 proposals received after the international call for proposals launched on 27 October 2022.
 
Piero D'Angelo, 36, a graduate in Fashion Womenswear from the Royal College of Art in London and in Textile Design from Central Saint Martins, is a Fashion and Textile Designer with a research focus on biotechnology in the fashion industry. In 2022 he founded his Fashion & Textile Design studio experimenting with a multidisciplinary approach on the importance of natural materials and Biodesign. From 2018 to 2022 Piero D'Angelo was a resident and then Product Researcher & Developer at Open Cell (Biotech Research Park), a biotech start-up community in London. He was awarded the Dorothy Waxman Textile Design Prize in 2015 and semi-finalist for the LVMH Prize in 2020.
 
In his communication project, 'Grow Your Own Couture' D'Angelo imagines a future scenario where it will be possible to grow one's own clothes through living organisms such as lichens that are able to absorb pollution. But the project also wants to communicate a return to nature and above all care and protection towards it. In fact, the user is not simply a user of fashion, but through a kit is part of the process of growth, care and creation of the garment, thus abandoning the traditional paradigms of fashion. The project wants to completely re-imagine the way fashion could be designed, produced and used, proposing not only a product, but also a system that wants to collaborate with nature instead of polluting or exploiting it.

Albstadt-based Mayer & Cie. has been named a Top 100 award-winner for the third time as one of Germany’s most innovative small and mid-range businesses. The jury made special mention of the circular knitting and braiding machine manufacturer’s innovative processes. At the centre of the family firm’s further digital development is on the aim to boost its customers’ productivity. Last Friday, 25 June, members of the Mayer & Cie. management received the award from the science journalist Ranga Yogeshwar at the SMB summit in Frankfurt am Main.

For some time now, the focus of development work at Mayer & Cie. has been on lean management in assembly processes, on optimisation of aftersales service, including setting up an online shop for spare parts, and on product lifecycle management, or PLM, which stands for a concept of seamless integration of all the information that arises during a product’s lifecycle. A clean data structure is the basis for these measures, it’s called the “digital backbone”. It means that all product data is processed in the same database and all information is available only once and can be downloaded immediately.

In all, 436 companies, including about ten per cent from machinery and plant engineering, competed for the Top 100 seal of innovation this year. Nearly 300 were successful and were congratulated in person by Ranga Yogeshwar at the SMB summit. He noted that the award winners set a role model example. “Innovators are thought leaders; they are always pioneers too,” said Yogeshwar, who mentors the competition. “They put their products to the test and ask themselves what an ecological society and a climate-oriented world will require of them. And they check the opportunities and challenges that increasing digitisation will bring for forms of cooperation, social relationships and, with them, for employee retention.”

• Winners in Six Categories to be Announced at IDEA® 2022 in Miami Beach

Online voting for the prestigious IDEA® Achievement Awards representing the “best of the best” innovations in the global nonwovens and engineered fabrics industry in six categories will open on Feb. 28.

Industry professionals will have the opportunity to vote for the winners from the finalists and see award-winning achievements in person at IDEA® 2022, the World’s Preeminent Event for Nonwovens & Engineered Fabrics, March 28-31, at the Miami Beach Convention Center.

Presented by INDA, in partnership with Nonwovens Industry magazine, the awards recognize the leading introductions in equipment, raw materials, short-life, long-life and nonwovens products, and sustainability. To vote on the Nonwovens Industry website, visit: https://www.nonwovens-industry.com/idea-reg-achievement-awards

In addition, INDA will unveil the IDEA® 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award honoree and Nonwovens Industry will announce the IDEA® Entrepreneur Achievement Award recipient at the event. 

All of the winners will be announced on March 30 at a ceremony at IDEA® from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. moderated by Dave Rousse, President, INDA and Karen, McIntyre, Editor, Nonwovens Industry.

Finalists Named

The INDA Technical Advisory Board, consisting of technical professionals from member companies, has narrowed the competition from more than 100 online nominations to the following 18 finalists selected for their leading innovations since the last IDEA show in 2019.

Now, the industry will have the chance to select their top choices from the three finalists in each of the following six categories through the online voting process:

1-    IDEA® Equipment Achievement Award

ESC-8 – Curt G. Joa, Inc.
Elastic Thread Anchoring (ETA) Sonotrode – Herrmann Ultrasonics Inc.
Doffer Airlay Card – Technoplants SRL
 

2-    IDEA® Raw Material Achievement Award

sero™ premium hemp fiber – Bast Fibre Technologies Inc.
ODOGard – Rem Brands, Inc.
SharoWIPES™ – Sharon Laboratories
 

3-    IDEA® Short-Life Product Achievement Award

MDP™ – Dermasteel, Ltd.
Organic 2.0 – Ellepot A/S
LifeSavers Wipes – LifeSavers LLC
 

4-     IDEA® Long-Life Product Achievement Award

Canopy Hero Pro – Canopy
Long-Life Cellulose-based Nonwovens for Higher Performance in Reusable Baby Diapers – Kelheim Fibres GmbH and Sumo Diapers
Nanofiber Cabin Air Filter – MANN + HUMMEL GmbH
 

5-    IDEA® Sustainability Advancement Award

Pureflow8 – In Flight Material Separator – Diaper Recycling Technology Pte. Ltd.
Fitesa® 100 Percent BioBased Bico – Fitesa
Fiber-based Screw Caps – Glatfelter Corp. and Blue Ocean Closures
 

6-    IDEA® Nonwoven Product Achievement Award

Sontara® Silk – Glatfelter Corp.
HYDRASPUN® Aquaflo – Sustainable Nonwoven Substrates – Suominen Corporation
LS SAF™ Nonwoven Fabrics –Technical Absorbents
 

Moving forward after this year, the IDEA® Achievement Award will be presented every two years under the new cycle announced for the event with the subsequent IDEA® taking place April 23-25, 2024.

• Excellent project to encourage ingenuity among young students
• Experiment on biodegradability of textiles and nonwovens produces impressive results
• EUR 30,000 in prize money for a total of 209 participating schools in and outside Austria
• Lenzing views supporting these kinds of projects as part of its sustainability mission

Lenzing – The Association of Chemistry Teachers in Austria – known by its German abbreviation, VCÖ – has been holding project competitions that thrill students and take them beyond the traditional syllabus for 30 years. Every two years, it highlights a key topic for ninth- and tenth-graders to explore by conducting special experiments and learning from their observations and conclusions.

This year, the 16th installment of the competition is called, “Achieving a cleaner climate and a circular economy with chemistry”. These topics are also near and dear to the heart of globally active fiber manufacturer Lenzing. That’s why the company promptly announced that it was prepared to support this project competition in several different ways. First, Lenzing made a contribution toward the sponsorship fund totaling EUR 30,000. Second, it initiated a special prize on biodegradability – a topic of growing importance given the huge challenges involved in reducing plastic waste. Finally, Lenzing placed a recognized expert at the students’ disposal to provide assistance and answer questions: Michaela Kogler, Project Manager Nonwovens & Technical Products.

Teaming up with rainworms

Two teams were tasked with biodegrading different fibers – just like those used to produce textiles and nonwovens – with the active participation of worms. Students at BRG solarCity in Linz buried fiber nonwovens, a basic material used in wet wipes and other products, in soil that was populated with numerous rainworms, while students at Vöcklabruck Junior High School for Sports and Integration layered textiles into a vermicomposting bin. Both experiments intended to determine the extent to which certain materials would biodegrade quickly. As it turned out, both projects showed that wood-based fibers, like those that Lenzing manufactures for the textile and nonwoven industry, break down very rapidly into natural constituents that swiftly pass into the soil. In contrast, fossil-based plastics such as polyester or polyethylene cannot be decomposed by worms or bacteria but remain in the soil, sometimes for hundreds of years.

The prizes for this year’s competition were awarded on June 11. The competition attracted entries from no fewer than 209 schools, including 11 from outside Austria. For more information on the projects and the winners, visit www.vcoe.or.at.

Pedex GmbH, the Wald Michelbach based Perlon Group company was named as a finalist of the ‘Großer Preis des Mittelstandes 2018’ (award for small and medium sized companies) at the gala dinner on 15th September 2018. Together with 21 other finalists from the four competing regions Baden Wurtemberg, Bavaria, Hesse and Thuringia came out on top against 2436 nominated businesses.

The motto for this year’s competition -‘Building for the future’ – is the foundation of the unity within our society.
On 24th May, the Oskar-Patzelt-Stiftung, the founder of this award for small and medium sized companies asked for nominations of excellent medium sized companies for the competition, (nominations cannot come from the company itself.) Only 1 in every 1000 German companies make it onto the list of nominations – this year Pedex GmbH made it! The prize winners meet 12 regional juries and a final jury. The focus of the jury (made up of representatives from business and education) is on the company as a whole and its multifaceted role within society. To aid evaluation, the jury asked about the establishment and safeguarding of jobs and apprenticeships, innovation and modernisation, involvement in the local area as well as service and proximity to customers.

Germany’s most sought after business accolade.
In 2018, more than 7400 institutions from the 16 counties (12 competing regions) throughout Germany nominated a total of 4,917 small and medium sized companies as well as banks and local authorities for the competition, from which a short list of 742 was selected. No other business award in Germany carries such weight (and has now for more than two decades) as the one that the Leipzig based Oskar-Patzelt-Stiftung has been awarding since 1994. The prize doesn’t offer any monetary reward. For the businesses involved, it’s simply about honour, public recognition and approval of their performance, without financial incentive.

Paris - On April 12th 2018, top European talents from 120 campuses will compete in the fourth edition of the Morpheus Cup to showcase their skills and highlight their most innovative projects. After Luxembourg in 2017, the event will take place in 2018 at the Palais Brongniart (Stock Exchange) in Paris and will focus on burning topics such as Digital Transformation, Creativity, Deeptech, Circular Economy, Ecommerce and much more.

Since its launch in 2015, the Morpheus Cup has been placed under the high patronage of the European Commission with the support of Commissioners Marianne Thyssen and Carlos Moedas in 2017. "The championship is a great opportunity for young people to showcase their skills and to help to bridge the gap between universities, schools and the European employment market. In the Commission, we believe that the right skills not only improve young people's life chances, but also act as a driver for our future competitiveness and growth" underlines Mrs. Thyssen.

In the last three years, the event already attracted hundreds of campus from more than 20 countries and rewarded many of them including Warshaw School of Economics, Mannheim Business School, HEC Paris, Polytechnique Nantes, universities from Oxford, Berlin, Luxembourg, Athens, and Barcelona.

New challenges for new talents

The next edition will take the competition to another level by featuring tech, business, science, marketing, creative challenges in five different rooms, suggesting meetings with employers, innovative brands and investors through 50 stands and presenting not less than 20 categories for students to submit their projects/startups ideas (Morpheus Prize). Apart from the live experiences and challenges designed by entrepreneurs or partners of the event, almost 500 research projects and startups will be showcased to win awards, the championship and up to €50,000 worth of prizes.

Art, circular economy, human capital, smart cities, mobility, FinTech, design, industry, sport, artificial intelligence, topics, regardless of the students’ profiles and education level, invite them to be creative in many different fields.

Finalists will have to pitch in front of an international jury. Past editions welcomed jury members from Google Lunar XPrize, WarnerBros, Accenture, European Investment Fund, FC Barcelona, ESA, Canal+, Novak Djokovic Foundation etc. Daimler, Forbes, Expon Capital, Davidson, Leroy-Merlin, PwC have already joined the next edition.

Registrations are already open. First partners, jury members and employers will be unveiled before Christmas season.

The Morpheus Cup’s website unveils the main characteristics of the championship and also the past editions prize-winners.