Research

Austria’s annual production of 220,000 tonnes of textile waste, of which almost 80 per cent is incinerated, could soon be put to good use as researchers look to process it to produce paper for packaging materials.

A report by global environmental action NGO WRAP has established clear benchmarks for repair and resale using data from six companies and helped to develop a single methodology that can be applied by businesses of all shapes and sizes, to give robust and comparable data on big environmental savings from preloved and repair, showing that introducing a little circular living into our lives reduces the price and the environmental price tag too.

Portugal’s University of Coimbra (UC) is developing innovative technologies to make textile dyeing more cost-effective and sustainable and a just launched project—DyeLoop—uses unique circular economy technologies to reuse dyes and significantly reduce water and energy consumption.

A breakthrough revolutionary thermoreversible adhesive technology that promises to make textile recycling significantly more scalable, reducing waste and improving sustainability in apparel manufacturing, is poised to transform the fashion industry.

A group of researchers has crafted an AI-enabled jacket with an electronic textile that warms the user without overheating and provides immediate temperature readings for easy monitoring.

The German Institutes of Textile and Fiber Research (DITF) and tech company, Heraeus, are researching to reduce the risk of infection from medical workwear. This forms the basis for future industrial production of textiles for durable and reliable protection against infection.

A new global study on the lifecycle assessment (LCA) of the modern cow leather industry has found that the farming stage (upstream) significantly contributes to the impact of five among six categories, and that that the values for several parameters were much lower than previously indicated.

A new research provides a solution to the mammoth problem of recycling textile waste — perhaps the first effective method for recycling both cotton and polyester components of polycotton with high efficiency.

New innovative cloth developed by a research group at the University of Waterloo requires no bulky batteries or manual controls, the warmth generated by the fabric comes entirely from solar energy, making it an environmentally friendly, self-sustaining solution for winter wear.

And now a multifunctional sensor based on semiconductor fibres that emulates the five human senses and is expected to be utilised in a variety of state-of-the-art technology fields such as wearables, Internet of Things (IoT), electronic devices, and soft robotics.