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Industry Associations
EURATEX and Partners Launch the New Horizon Europe Innovation Project on Circular & Sustainable Textiles
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Launched on September 27, 2022, the Horizon Europe project CISUTAC will support the transition to a circular and sustainable textile sector. Launched today, the new Horizon Europe project CISUTAC will support the transition to a circular and sustainable textile sector. As part of a consortium of 27 partners working on the project, EURATEX will work towards facilitating the Circular Economy transition.
While the production and consumption of textile products continue to grow, so does the impact on the environment caused by a lack of reuse, repair, and recycling of materials. Quality, durability, and recyclability are often not set as priorities in the design and manufacturing of garments (EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, March 2022).CISUTAC aims to remove current bottlenecks in order to increase textile circularity in Europe. The objective is to minimize the sector’s total environmental impact by developing new, sustainable, and integrated large-scale European value chains.
The project will include most parts of the textile sector: comprising the two groups of fibers that represent almost 90% of all textile fibers (polyester and cotton/cellulose), and focusing on products from three sub-sectors experiencing the most circularity bottlenecks (fashion garments, sports, and outdoor goods, and workwear).
CISUTAC will follow a holistic approach covering the technical, sectoral, and socio-economic aspects, and will perform 3 pilot phases to demonstrate the feasibility and value of:
• Repair and disassembling • Sorting (for reuse and recycling) • Circular garments through fiber-to-fiber recycling and design for circularity
To realize these pilots, the consortium partners will: • Develop semi-automated workstations • Analyze infrastructure and material flows • Digitally enhance sorting operations (for reuse and recycling) • Raise awareness among consumers and the textile industry
As part of the CISUTAC consortium, EURATEX will facilitate the Circular Economy transition, liaise with other projects & initiatives, support the development of training and educational material, including masterclasses and MOOC, raise awareness in Europe of the environmental impact of textiles and provide input for policy, standardization, and certification to facilitate the transition to the Circular Economy.
More information on the CISUTAC project is on its website: www.cisutac.eu.
About CISUTACCISUTAC is a Horizon Europe project, co-funded by the European Union. It started on 1 September 2022 and will last for 48 months. Led by Centexbel, the Belgian research center for textiles and plastics, the CISUTAC consortium is EU-wide including global leading brands and companies, CSOs, RTOs, and EU associations. The diversity within the consortium allows CISUTAC to cover all required expertise and infrastructure over the entire novel circular value chain. The complete list of partners is available here. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 101060375.