The new EIT Innovation Agenda for Circular Textiles and Fashion will explore synergies in innovation, training, and investment to accelerate its goals. The group supports the setting up of large-scale tech demonstrations across Europe to test, validate, and facilitate industrial uptake and replication.
The first workshop of the EIT Innovation Agenda for Circular Textiles and Fashion took place on the premises of the ITA Group – International Centre for Sustainable Textiles of RWTH Aachen University. Member of the EU Parliament Dr. Christian Ehler joined the EIT Knowledge and Innovation Communities for the kick-off, along with the representatives of 20 different European businesses, research centres, universities, and associations. They shared the challenges and opportunities facing the European textile and fashion sectors and advocated for improving the innovation funding mechanisms supporting transition pathways to circular models for more sustainable fashion.
The workshop also covered the challenges regarding customer behaviour. According to EC reports, EU citizens dump 11 kg of clothes per year. The climate emergency requires decisive action in helping people break this habit. All three EIT Knowledge and Innovation Communities are committed to exploring joint programmes that incentivise innovation in the fashion and textile industries through cross-fertilisation of innovators, talent, and businesses along the value chain.
The group has established a timeline for delivering the EIT Innovation Agenda on Circular Textiles and Fashion over the course of 2023 in support of the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, whereby: “By 2030 textile products placed on the EU market are long-lived and recyclable, to a great extent made of recycled fibres, free of hazardous substances and produced in respect of social rights and the environment. Consumers benefit longer from high quality affordable textiles, fast fashion is out of fashion, and economically profitable re-use and repair services are widely available. In a competitive, resilient and innovative textiles sector, producers take responsibility for their products along the value chain, including when they become waste.”
Considering how urgent it is to transform the current value creation processes to secure the future of the planet, the event organisers, ITA Group, reinvented itself as the “International Centre for Sustainable Textiles”. The main goal of the Centre is the holistic biotransformation of textile technology value creation processes, which includes the closing of raw material cycles, circularity of textile value chains and reduction of energy and water consumption, based on the principle of “design for recycling” as a fundamental paradigm of product development. The Centre with the motto “Textile Innovations: Sustainable. Digital. Individual.” is headed by Professor Thomas Gries, who believes that this workshop is the need of the hour.
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