- An EU-funded initiative has reached a significant milestone in the creation of a master plan for the efficient recycling of used textiles.
- Extended solutions will soon be tested throughout Europe, and regional research will be done on their replication potential.
- Additionally, local community actors will be involved in the development and enhancement of its plan.
Finding answers to the expanding problem of textile waste is becoming more and more important on a European and worldwide scale. With the creation of a knowledge-based masterplan and blueprint to create and illustrate efficient textile recovery, reuse, waste valorisation, and recycling procedures, the EU-funded project tExtended is leading the way in this field of innovation.
Following two years of intensive study, Extended is now moving into the second stage of the project, where it will continue to create its Conceptual Framework, a knowledge-based approach that focuses on quality retention. In order to demonstrate its ability to cut textile waste by 80%, Extended is also getting ready to test it in a real-scale demonstration of the Industrial-Urban Symbiosis collaboration.
Our effort on creating a blueprint is something we are eager to advance. Dr. Pirjo Heikkilä, the Extended Project Coordinator at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, states: “We believe that our solutions will strengthen competitiveness and resilience through sustainability and digitalization, while also generating new business. The textile sector still lacks technologies and infrastructures that can effectively support the shift to a circular model.”
All of the countries in the extended consortium—Finland, Sweden, Belgium, France, Ireland, Latvia, Slovakia, Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland—will host these project activities in various formats. Although the real-scale demonstration will be conducted in a large-scale European partnership, tExtended will also conduct localized regional studies to assess the replication. potential.
Through the involvement of local community actors in project activities, the four-year project, which is supported by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe research and innovation initiative, also focuses on the social component of the textile sector. tExtended will increase individuals’ understanding of the sustainability and circularity of textiles by having them participate in various initiatives pertaining to pre-sorting, returning, and used textiles.
The initiative has already achieved notable milestones along the way to creating the extended vision for a sustainable textile environment. In particular, the outcomes of the enhancement of upcycling procedures and the creation of a data-driven circular ecosystem in the future will impact the forthcoming efforts to achieve the Extended targets.
To read more information on the improvement of upcycling processes, please visit our website: https://textended.eu/2023/11/29/textended-reaches-milestone-on-upcycling-processes/
