From the Sector

After two years of joint collaboration and research the Swiss Textile Recycling Project “Texcircle” comes to an end. Partners and stakeholders have worked on the vision of a textile cluster where materials flow in circular loops. The goal of the project was to develop high-quality yarns and products incorporating such a large amount of recycled textiles as possible. In the end, several product prototypes from carpets, socks, and curtains to pullovers, padding and accessories have been developed with at least 50 % recycled fiber up to 80 % recycled fibers and yarns.

Europe has a waste problem of 7.5 million waste of which only 30-35 % is collected and less than 1 % of the textile and clothing worldwide is recycled into textiles and clothing again. It is as well found that around 80 % of the impact of a textile product lies in the design.

Together with the design research expertise of the Lucerne University of Applied sciences and arts, the spinning expertise of Rieter and the sorting and collection expertise of Texaid, systems should be created where products of high quality can be produced of recycled fiber. On board were the expertise of further Cluster partners of Brands, Retailers, and the public sector to see how a joint Cluster and system coukld be established.

The Project Texcircle and cluster is led by the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts – Art  & Design, and in collaboration with Coop, Rieter, Jacob Rohner AG, Ruckstuhl AG, TEXAID as well as workfashion.com ag. Furthermore, Bundesamt für Zivildienst ZIVI, NIKIN AG, and Tiger Liz Textiles are supporting the project. The project is funded by Innosuisse.

Furthermore, collaboration partners from all over Europe contributed to the project to enable these prototypes and systems.

Through joint developments from the design, the collecting, sorting trials, tearing, and spinning trials until the actual production trials and product testing. The partners were able to recycle 2.5 Tons of pre-and post-consumer textile waste into product prototypes with a promising commercial interest. From socks, west, and pullovers to non-woven felts and accessories to carpets and curtains. Through our 2 years of collaboration, the teamcame across several hurdles in the textile recycling value chain which could be tackled. This was a proof of concept that a circular system is possible and the industry now has to enable this at full scale.

• Lenzing becomes partner company of CISUTAC
• New project CISUTAC, co-funded by the EU, shall remove barriers to circularity in the textile industry
• Lenzing will make a contribution in cellulose recycling

The Lenzing Group, a leading provider of specialty fibers for the textile and nonwoven industries, is reinforcing its commitment to circularity by becoming a partner in the CISUTAC (Circular and Sustainable Textile and Clothing) project that is co-funded by the EU. The new consortium was established to support the transition to a circular and sustainable textile sector and, as well as Lenzing, the 27 consortium members include the industry association Euratex, textile company Inditex, PVH, Decathlon and non-governmental organization Oxfam. For its part, Lenzing is focusing on the development of recycling processes for cellulose.
 
CISUTAC aims to remove current bottlenecks in order to enhance textile circularity in Europe. Its goal is to minimize the sector’s total environmental impact by developing sustainable, novel and inclusive large-scale European value chains.

and textile technology company Infinited Fiber Company’s work to build the world’s first commercial-scale Infinna™ textile fiber factory in Kemi, Finland, has progressed largely according to plan since the announcement of the factory site in June 2022. The company is increasing its focus on scaling Infinna™ production volume further as quickly as possible. This is in response to the continued and growing customer demand for the company’s high-quality regenerated textile fiber Infinna™. The market impacts of the ongoing war in Ukraine – including the increased uncertainty on the global utility, commodity and financial markets – have highlighted the need to proceed rapidly with technology scaling on multiple fronts.
 
“We are not immune to the global market context in which we operate. The supply chain issues stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic are still wreaking havoc, and the ongoing war in Ukraine has dealt a heavy blow to the global utility, commodity, and financial markets – and to us. We are satisfied with the progress at the site of our planned commercial-scale factory and the opening of the factory remains our key priority. The current, unstable market environment has highlighted the need for us to also accelerate efforts to simultaneously pursue other avenues for scaling production, with the ultimate aim of serving our customers in the best possible way in the long run,” said Infinited Fiber Company CEO and cofounder Petri Alava.
 
Infinited Fiber Company said in June that it planned to build a factory to produce Infinna™, a textile fiber that can be created 100% from cotton-rich textile waste, at the site of a discontinued paper mill in Kemi, Finland. The factory is expected to create around 270 jobs in the area and to have an annual production capacity of 30,000 metric tons, equivalent to the fiber needed for about 100 million T-shirts. The future factory’s customer-base includes several of the world’s leading apparel companies, with most of the future production capacity already sold out for several years.
 
Since June, Infinited Fiber Company has advanced the site-specific basic engineering, recruitment planning, vendor selection, and permit processes according to plan. The limited component availability caused by the continuing impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have, however, prolonged significantly the delivery times for some of the key equipment and machinery needed for the factory. As a result of these developments, Infinited Fiber Company has re-evaluated its overall factory project timeline. The first commercial fiber deliveries from Kemi are now expected to begin in January 2026. The scope of the project remains unchanged and construction work at the site is expected begin during 2023 as previously communicated.
 
In addition, the European energy crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine has caused the electricity prices in Finland to roughly triple, and the prices of some of the key chemicals needed in the fiber regeneration process have risen by some 200-300% since the start of the war.
 
“We of course don’t have a crystal ball. But according to our advisors and other experts, utility and commodity prices are forecast to normalize before 2026, when we now expect the first commercial fiber deliveries from Kemi to be shipped. In addition to the likely normalization of the market, the extended timeline enables us to undertake the necessary measures to develop the profitability of the future factory. The growing demand for Infinna™, despite the general turbulence, is an encouraging and clear indication of the fashion industry’s commitment to circularity,” said Petri Alava.

RHEON LABS, a fast-growing materials technology company based in Battersea, London, has completed an extensive 6 month trial with FET, a world leader in laboratory and pilot meltspinning equipment. Backed by a £173,000 grant from Innovate UK for feasibility studies, RHEON LABS has further developed its RHEON™ technology, a reactive polymer that dynamically stiffens when subjected to force. The technology can control energy of any amplitude or frequency, from small vibrations to forces at ballistic-speeds and therefore has a wide range of applications.
 
This Innovate UK Smart Grant-backed project aims to develop a hyper viscoelastic fibre from RHEON™ which displays high strain-rate sensitive properties. Creating a fibre with unique strain-rate sensitive properties will be a world first. It will enable the creation of a 'breakthrough-generation' of stretch textiles that can actively absorb, dampen and control energy during movement, rather than simply acting as a spring.

For close-fitting activewear and sports bras, the ability to actively control muscle mass or soft tissue movement during exercise will be a game-changing advancement. It will allow brands to engineer garments that relax during everyday use but actively stiffen during exercise for improved support and performance.
The Innovate UK grant was awarded under the category of Hyper-Viscoelastic Fibre Extrusion for Textile Manufacture. Fibre Extrusion Technology Limited (FET) enabled the customer trials at its bespoke Fibre Development Centre in Leeds, England using its in-house FET-103 Monofilament meltspinning facilities, in harness with RHEON and FET technical operatives. The next phase will be to upscale the trials of preferred materials on RHEON’s own new FET-103 meltspinning line, with FET’s continued support and expertise on hand.
 
Creating a fibre with unique strain-rate sensitive characteristics could be as radical a change in the market as the initial introduction of stretch fibre with the launch of Lycra™. The textiles would have a multitude of beneficial properties and would provide significantly less compression in the garment than conventional materials, substantially improving user comfort, support and performance.

Carbios published its operating and financial results for the first half of 2022. The financial statements as of June 30, 2022 were approved by Carbios' Board of Directors.

• Project to build the world's first PET biorecycling plant, in partnership with Indorama Ventures, the world's largest manufacturer of recycled PET: Establishment in France with strong backing from national government and the Grand-Est Region
• On track to bring recycled PET from Carbios' proprietary innovation process to market by 2025
• Fully operational industrial demonstration plant and step-by-step technological validation of the scale-up of the industrial solution designed and developed by Carbios
• Launch of a textile consortium in partnership with On, Patagonia, PUMA and Salomon
• Scientific article in the prestigious Biophysical Journal
• Carbios strengthens its Governance and Management team
• Carbios enhance its financial structure, banking the €30 million loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB)
• Carbios Group's net cash position: €121 million at June 30, 2022

See the full report here.

Within the scope of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) initiative “The Sustainability Pledge”, to improve transparency and traceability for sustainable garment and footwear supply chains, the Swiss company Haelixa traces Egyptian cotton from the source up to premium shirts.

The UNECE and United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) has been developing over the period 2019-2022 policy recommendations, implementation guidelines, a call to action, and a traceability toolbox including blockchain and DNA tracing solutions, which has been implemented in few different textile supply chains. Haelixa is part of the group of experts that develops such policy recommendations and conducts projects with key industry players to set traceability benchmarks and later develop them into standards.

Fashion brands are often responsible for complex global value chains and traceability is the needed tool to enable trust, transparency and credible sustainability. The magnitude of the supply chain traceability challenge can be overwhelming for brands, but the UNECE initiative framework facilitates the alignment with suppliers, provides the necessary guidance and the needed tools, with Haelixa as physical traceability provider.

To make the premium shirts traceable, Haelixa has developed a DNA marker to label the raw material, premium Egyptian cotton. The DNA marker has been applied as fine spray to GIZA 96 lint cotton in Borg Al Arab, Egypt and used to produce the finest fabric by Swiss manufacturer Weba. Once applied to the fibers, Haelixa’s DNA markers stay safely embedded into the material and withstand the industrial processing, ensuring traceability from the source until the finished garment. Samples of lint cotton, yarn, and fabric at different steps were verified with a test based on PCR, and the correct DNA marker was detected, thereby enabling the identification of the premium product, of its origin and the specific supply chain. The forensic data obtained were recorded on a blockchain system provided by UNECE. The marked fabric was used to make Hugo Boss cotton dress shirts. As one of the leading premium fashion brands and partner to the UNECE project, Hugo Boss is responsible for a complex global value chain and strives for high sustainability standards and is looking at traceability options.

“In cases like this one, where the material is of the highest quality and the product is shipped from one facility to another for premium processing, adding physical traceability is critical to ensure that the origin, quality and processing claims can be backed up" says Gediminas Mikutis, CTO and co-founder at Haelixa.

Maria Teresa Pisani, Economic Affairs Officer and Project Lead at UNECE, emphasized: “Traceability and transparency are crucial elements to protect environmental, social, and human rights along global value chains. At UNECE, we aim to enhance traceability approaches by exploring new and innovative solutions that help identify and address negative impacts in the fashion industry.”

The garment is part of the New Cotton Project, an EU Consortium of key players united to demonstrate the potential of circular garment production
adidas by Stella McCartney presented a first of its kind sportswear garment designed to demonstrate the potential of a circular fashion ecosystem. Joining forces with leading names and innovators in the fashion industry to create, test, and innovate, the tracksuit forms the pinnacle expression of the brand’s pilot circularity program, Made to Be Remade. A take-back scheme where consumers can wear it down and then return it by scanning a QR code via the product so it can be remade. Moving adidas closer to its goal to help end plastic waste.

It’s currently estimated that just under 1% of all textiles worldwide are recycled into new textiles, so it’s vital the textile industry comes together to learn and knowledge-share. Scheduled across a three-year period, the consortium which includes partners such as Frankenhuis have collected and sorted post-consumer end-of-life textiles, which using pioneering Infinited Fiber technology have been regenerated into a new man-made cellulosic fiber called Infinna™ - which looks and feels just like virgin cotton. This is then turned into a yarn blended with organic cotton, for garment production.

Designing the tracksuit, made using viscose (60% viscose, 40% organic cotton) as a consortium member took the process from a linear to a circular model , as the apparel’s function and style were of equal focus to the garment’s end of life existence.

At the end of the project, consortium partner Aalto University, a Finnish multidisciplinary community specialising in science, art, technology , and design, will distribute learnings with the industry and bring this potential circular design solution to the ever-eco-conscious consumer.

More than 350 million tons of plastic are produced worldwide every year, and vast amounts of plastic waste simply end up in the environment. The circular economy offers enormous potential for keeping plastics in the loop and thus conserving resources and the environment. Since 2018, six Fraunhofer institutes in the Fraunhofer CCPE cluster have been researching how to make the plastics value chain circular, and Prof. Manfred Renner has been the new head of the cluster since August 2022. Research results, implementation projects and strategies to accelerate the transformation to a circular plastics economy will be presented by Fraunhofer CCPE at the first international Fraunhofer CCPE Summit on February 8 and 9, 2023 in Munich.

In a circular plastics economy, resources can be saved, products can be intelligently designed for long service life, and end-of-life losses can be reduced. Systemic, technical and social innovations are needed to make the transition from a linear to a circular economy a success. This is what the Fraunhofer Cluster of Excellence Circular Plastics Economy CCPE is researching in the three divisions “Materials”, “Systems” and “Business”. The cooperation of the six Fraunhofer institutes IAP, ICT, IML, IVV, LBF and UMSICHT enables a multi-stakeholder approach in which the appropriate R&D competencies are bundled.

Fraunhofer CCPE would like to present and discuss successful projects and research approaches on an international scale at the Fraunhofer CCPE Summit on February 8 and 9, 2023 in Munich. The summit is to become an international forum for exchanging ideas for solutions and innovations for a circular plastics economy.

Cross-industry collaboration - local, regional and international
Since August 2022, Prof. Manfred Renner, Institute Director of Fraunhofer UMSICHT, is the new head of Fraunhofer CCPE. He succeeds Prof. Eckhard Weidner, who has retired. “Cross-industry cooperation - very local, but also regional and international - is the elementary prerequisite for a functioning circular plastics economy. At the summit, players from all points of the compass will meet and network in order to rethink the plastics value chain together," explains Prof. Manfred Renner, adding, “We want to provide answers to the following questions:  How can we make all Circular Economy principles, i.e. the ten R-strategies, known? How can industry, science and society best cooperate in a transformation to a circular plastics economy for the greatest possible impact?”

Results of the Fraunhofer CCPE cluster so far are innovative approaches for circular business models, intelligent collection, sorting, and recycling technologies, but also new formulations for circular polymers and compounds to enable multiple recycling cycles. With the newly developed assessment tool CRL® , companies can, for example, self-assess the maturity of products or product systems with regard to the circular economy. The tool checks the extent to which a product already takes into account circular economy principles in the areas of product design, product service system, end-of-life management and circular economy, and where there is still potential for improvement.

A new fabric inspection technique for accurately detecting the most subtle of defects on patterned fabrics during high speed production has been developed by BTMA member Shelton Vision, of Leicester, UK.

The patent-pending system has been integrated into the company’s WebSpector platform and validated through factory trials on a purpose-built full scale in-house demonstration system with sophisticated fabric transport capabilities. As a result, a first system has already been ordered by a manufacturer of both plain and patterned fabrics, including camouflage, in Colombia. This follows the successful conclusion of a 21-month Innovate UK project in which techniques for the resolution of complex pattern deformations were developed by machine vision and computer scientists in the company, backed up by the machine vision and robotics department at Loughborough University.

Restrictions
Traditional methods for defect detection rely on human inspection which is ineffective, with detection rates under 65%, while the Shelton WebSpector machine vision system offers a sophisticated platform for automated defect detection of over 97%, but until now has been restricted to plain textiles.

While pattern matching and neural network approaches have previously been tried for patterned textiles, they have failed to provide a practical solution due to the extreme complexity associated with pattern matching on deformable substrates like textiles, as well as the time required to train a neural network for each pattern type.

Challenges
The challenge is that fabrics are not rigid and can be creased or stretched and are also subject to local distortion,” says Shelton Vision Managing Director and CEO Mark Shelton. “As a result, inspection without the technique we have developed, would lead to thousands of false positives. Our sophisticated pattern inspection software techniques ensure a clean image, allowing the detection of faults on fabrics running at speeds of up to a hundred metres a minute.”

The full system consists of:

• A camera and lighting system for optimum image capture at high speed and associated image processing hardware.
• Self-training software utilising statistical analysis to automate the system configuration for new textile products.
• An advanced suite of defect detection algorithms for the detection of all textile defect types.
• An AI-driven defect classification system which learns and automates defect naming in real time, as well as a real time defect grading capability based on client decision rules.
• A system for recording and retrieving complete roll map images for subsequent review and quality control.

The generation of textile roll maps with complete defect data allows for an optimised textile cut plan, improved downstream processing and quality assurance.

The future of e-mobility will be determined in particular by safe battery enclosures. As batteries for electric vehicles become more performant, higher volumetric energy density plays a crucial role. If more energy is to be stored in less installation space, new material and design solutions are required. The development of suitable enclosures made of safe and highly robust lightweight materials is also required. This is a case for the Aachen Centre for Integrative Lightweight Production (AZL). A project on cell-to-pack battery enclosures for battery-electric vehicles, which has been eagerly awaited in the industry, will start in October this year there.

The design of battery housings is crucial for safety, capacity, performance, and economics. The Cell-to-Pack project, which is starting now, will focus on developing concepts for structural components and for producing them based on a variety of materials and design approaches. The concepts will be compared in terms of performance, weight and production costs, creating new know-how for OEMs, producers and their suppliers throughout the battery vehicle value chain. Companies are now invited to participate in this new cross-industry project to develop battery enclosure concepts for the promising and trend-setting cell-to-pack technology.

The basis for the project is the lightweight engineering expertise of the AZL experts, which they have already demonstrated in previous projects for multi-material solutions for module-based battery housings. Together with 46 industry partners, including Audi, Asahi Kasei, Covestro, DSM, EconCore, Faurecia, Hutchinson, Johns Manville, Magna, Marelli and Teijin, 20 different multi-material concepts were optimized in terms of weight and cost and compared with a reference component made from aluminum. All production steps were modelled in detail to obtain reliable cost estimates for each variant. Result: depending on the concept, 20% weight or 36% cost savings potential could be identified by using multi-material composites compared to the established aluminum reference.

It is expected that the design concept of battery enclosures will develop in the direction of a more efficient layout. In this case, the cells are no longer combined in modules in additional production steps, but are integrated directly into the battery housing. The elimination of battery modules and the improved, weight-saving use of space will allow for higher packing density, reduced overall height and cost saving. In addition, various levels of structural integration of the battery housing into the body structure are expected. These new designs bring specific challenges, including ensuring protection of the battery cells from external damage and fire protection. In addition, different recyclability and repair requirements may significantly impact future designs. How the different material and structural options for future generations of battery enclosures for the cell-to-pack technology might look like and how they compare in terms of cost and environmental impact will be investigated in the new AZL project. In addition to the material and production concepts from the concept study for module-based battery enclosures, results from a currently ongoing benchmarking of different materials for the impact protection plate and a new method for determining mechanical properties during a fire test will also be incorporated.

The project will start on October 27, 2022 with a kick-off meeting of the consortium, interested companies can still apply for participation until then.