One thing was clear at this year's annual conference of the European Technology Platform (ETP) that was held at Brussels in the last week of March: textile research is now more geared towards a circular economy. Research, however, has been getting less support from the European Commission than earlier, and it is here that China has been stealing a march over European countries. Jozef De Coster reports.

A significant chunk of the European textiles industry wants to transform itself into a 'low impact' industry, an industry with a small ecological footprint. A lot of the research projects which are currently supported by the European Commission focus on sustainability. But, at the 12th edition of the annual public conference of the European Technology Platform (ETP) for Fibres, Textiles, Clothing at Brussels, it was not always clear if the researchers who enthusiastically pitched their projects, are mainly driven by promising market prospects, or by ecological concerns, or both.

Textile technology has not the reputation of being a new, disrupting technology; it's still evolving. According to Lutz Walter, secretary-general of the European Textile Technology Platform, technical textile products will play an important role in the further development of electro-mobility, personalised health care, renewable energy and other future oriented market segments.

Just like at the first annual ETP conference in May 2006, representatives of the European textile research institutes, industry and the European Commission, still seem to take it for granted that Europe is the industry world leader in the field of advanced textile applications.

However, Paolo Canonico, technical and R&D director of the Italian Saati Group, who's the current chairman of ETP, expressed concern at the present situation of European textiles research and innovation.

 

On the one hand, Canonico sees a lot of positive trends for the European textiles industry. The global consumer market will continue growing, with technical end-markets for textiles growing even faster. Europe may have lost much of its clothing textiles industry, but in the field of technical textiles it has developed a highly efficient local production. The worldwide demand for system solutions will continue growing and no one is better positioned than Europe to deliver value in the market segments of smart, high-performance textile materials or circular economy products. On the other hand, Canonico is afraid that European leadership in textile research and innovation will increasingly come under pressure from foreign, especially Chinese, competition.

China is fast stealing the march

The question that stirred up was: is the European Commission losing interest in the textiles sector? Bernd Reichert, Head of 'SMEs in Horizon 2020' at the Agency for Small and Medium Enterprises of the European Commission, admitted that only 20 textile SMEs got support from the agency in the period 2014-2016. This means that textile companies represented less than 1 per cent of all SMEs (2,471) who together during that period received a support for upscaling and growth of Euro 979 million.

Could the reason be that textile SMEs are less eagerly looking for subventions than their counterparts from other sectors? Surely not. According to Walter of the textile ETP, textile companies have been very active to get European support under the Horizon 2020 (2014-2020) research and innovation programme. However, during the first three years of Horizon 2020, the acceptation percentage of the submitted textile projects was not higher than 6.4 per cent. Walter is disappointed by what he calls a "jackpot" model of support. How can textile companies remain motivated to submit projects when they know that only 1 out of 16 submitted projects get support?

Canonico addressed the representatives of the European Commission at the conference with the plea for more support. He recently visited China and compared the present situation of Chinese textile research with the situation of six months ago. He concluded that Europe is still the world leader in textile technology, but China is now advancing much faster than Europe. If Europe can't increase the speed of its research and innovation, it will have a huge problem. Not only is China keen to support textiles research, in the United States too, the programme 'Advanced functional fabrics of America' provides $325 million of support to industry.

The ETP chairman said: "We need the support of the European Union (EU) to retain our leadership. What can we do to get more attention?" He suggested that the European Commission should play a more dynamic role in creating a critical mass for textile research, in connecting the traditional textile clusters in different countries, and in increasing the intra-European mobility of textile researchers.

Circular economy is not a pipe dream

For several decades now, scientists from many academic fields have been warning humanity that it's heading for a mega-catastrophe if it does not change its destructive course. Homo sapiens are rapidly transforming the biosphere of the Blue Planet into a giant prosthesis, a so-called second-order cybernetic system that is doomed to collapse. Fortunately, the thinking part of humanity is taking action. Even in a centuries-old sector like textiles and clothing many actors are ready to drop the linear economy and instead step into the circular economy.

At the ETP conference, numerous textile industry research projects aimed to contribute to the new circular economy. Several of those projects, most of them still little known, like Resyntex, Bio4Self, Trash2Cash, TCBL, ECWRTI, Life-EcotexNano- Midwor-Life, are incidentally supported by the EU.

Dutch textile researcher Anton Luiken spoke on behalf of European textiles and apparel association Euratex, whose systematic recycling of textiles and chemicals could be part of the circular economy. Luiken argued that processed textile fibres do not belong to the natural cycle (and thus should not be composted), but to the chemical cycle. The end destination of big quantities of textile fibres is still a landfill or incineration. About one-third of discarded clothing and home textiles in Europe-this means more than 2 million tonnes annually-is collected and mostly finds a destination as re-usable clothing (50-60 per cent), as resource for the wiper industry (10-20 per cent), as material for mechanical recycling (15-20 per cent) or as waste (5-10 per cent for incineration or landfill).

The EU-funded programme Resyntex wants to find recycling solutions for the still existing waste. This is a challenge which cannot be successfully responded to as long as designers and textiles and garment manufacturers do not collaborate. Nowadays, most textiles and fashion designers have no clue on how to select easily recyclable materials. Glued fibres, twined yarns and woven fabrics with a high percentage of elastane-all these materials make recycling difficult. Too many textile manufacturers are still using fibre blends, chlorinated and fluorinated finishes, heavy metals and other materials that frustrate recycling efforts. The disassembling of clothing is a problem as long as garment manufacturers do not apply alternative bonding techniques.

A recently launched European project, called Fibersort, is building on a new technology that automatically sorts large volumes of mixed postconsumer textiles by fibre type. Once sorted, these materials become reliable, consistent input materialsfor high-value textiles. Traci Kinden, speaking for Dutch social enterprise Circle Economy, said: "High-value recycling technologies can transition low value waste into new, high-value textiles. They are a critical link in the circular supply chain.

Fibersort is thus a key technology that will enable textile resources to cycle repeatedly through the supply chain. Once commercialised, it will create a tipping point for a new, circular textile industry." One of the partners of the Fibersort project is the Salvation Army.

Different speeds

It is not that textile companies of all types and sizes from all European nations are now heading as one army from the old linear economy into the new circular economy. But yes, some countries and some enterprises are moving faster than others. SMEs may be more flexible than large companies, but they lack the knowledge and financial power that most large companies have. Few SMEs were among the 175 participants at the textile ETP meeting, but large companies like Marzotto (Italy), Ikea (Sweden), Lectra (France), Sioen (Belgium), Zorlu Textile Group (Turkey) had one or more networkers in the conference room.

Moreover, some textile clusters, regions or countries are more actively participating in EU-funded collaborative research projects than others. To give an example: the scope of the Retex exchange and innovation platform, which aims to give a second life to used textile materials, is restricted to France and Belgium. Much wider is the geographic scope of the Save Energy in Textile (SET) project, that assists textile SMEs in assessing their energy saving potential. SET is currently implemented in Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria and Lithuania, and is still open to teaming up with new organisations all over Europe.