According to the World Resources Institute, roughly 20 pieces of clothing are manufactured per person each year. While today’s consumers tend to purchase 60% more clothing than in 2000, they keep it for about half as long. Understanding what consumers do with textile items and clothes they no longer want or need is a crucial element of the RESYNTEX project.
The first round of the RESYNTEX Citizen Labs will take place in Manchester on the 5th and 6th October 2017. RESYNTEX is an EU project, looking at new ways of turning textile waste into a valuable resource, and keeping it out of landfill.
Our third newsletter is now available online. It's been just over two years now since we started exploring circular processes to produce chemicals from fibres in post-consumer textiles, such as wool, cotton and polyester.
RESYNTEX will use lessons learnt from the BIOCORE project to realise the design of an industrial scale ‘textile-refinery’. The European research project was one of the first attempts to design a second generation biorefinery supplied with mixed biomass feedstock. Three RESYNTEX Partners – Arkema, CHIMAR and National Technical University of Athens – were involved in the earlier project. The problem of chemical and biochemical processing of waste textiles is similar to that of a multiproduct second generation biorefinery as the feedstock is also waste in the form of residual biomass.
A report by Oakdene Hollins has identified and evaluated a range of residual textile waste streams produced by EU Member States. The findings demonstrate how RESYNTEX could consume a share of this waste to create new materials. Residuals from clothing sorters was identified as the most accessible source of textiles for RESYNTEX.
Leading figures in fashion, textile and waste management attended the fourth and final RESYNTEX Stakeholder Focus Group on Thursday 6 April 2017 in Prato, Italy. This event is part of RESYNTEX’s stakeholder mapping and consultations. Partners from Prospex Institute, Biochemtex, Dettin and Manchester Metropolitan University hosted the event at the Chamber of Commerce in Prato.
The sixth Fibre Recycling Symposium will be held 7-8 June 2017 at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). A call for papers is now open and the deadline for submitting abstracts is 24 March 2017. This year, the event will promote emerging technologies in order to support recycling and re-use of ‘valuable’ waste. Up to 25 million tonnes of plastic and/or fibrous waste is produced every year in the UK alone – a tenth of the country’s total amount of yearly waste!
Our second newsletter is now available online. In this edition you will find updates on new technology and processes, a new paper on hyperspectral imaging and more.
View the full newsletter here.
On Wednesday 30 November 2016, RESYNTEX took further strides towards making a circular economy concept for textiles and chemicals a viable European reality. The project partners from Prospex Institute, Institute for Environment Protection and Sensors (IOS), University of Maribor and Manchester Metropolitan University hosted an event which brought together key stakeholders throughout the local and regional textile collection, waste, recycling and environment fields. The Focus Group workshop took place at the headquarters of the Institute for Environment Protection and Sensors in Maribor.
In a recent paper, Imec evaluated how hyperspectral imaging can be used for textile sorting and recycling in industry. The paper was presented at the HSI 2016 Conference in Coventry during October and was authored by Carolina Blanch-Perez-del-Notario and Andy Lambrechts.
The feasibility study was performed over a variety of pure textile materials (cotton, viscose, polyester, wool, silk and polyamides) and blends (cotton and polyester, viscose and polyester). The results are promising and seem to indicate that material discrimination can be performed by means of hyperspectral imaging in the VIS-NIR range.
Keep up to date with our regular newsletter!
Our Citizen Labs gathered information on stakeholders’ #recycling behaviour with entertaining and interactive games… https://t.co/pjl5jxp4WS
Thu 19th Oct 2017Our project was discussed at @SPIRE2030’s EU Process Industry Conference this September. Find the presentation here… https://t.co/sdKZdKzaoV
Tue 17th Oct 2017
RESYNTEX received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement 641942.
