On their path to become circular, European fashion firms and textile suppliers encounter obstacles that a new collaboration, Cisutac, seeks to remove. With the help of 27 partners and co-funding from the European Union (EU), the initiative intends to expand the capacity for waste clothing to be reused, repaired, and recycled.
“The European textile industry is already working towards a more sustainable fashion,” said project coordinator Charlotte Denis.
The four-year Circular and Sustainable Textile and Clothing (Cisutac) programme aims to break down existing bottlenecks and create new, circular, and integrated large-scale European value chains.
The project, which was started in September, is run by Centexbel, a research facility for textiles and plastics in Belgium. They are in charge of coordinating the entire project, creating the pilots, and supporting the Life Cycle Assessments, a technique for calculating the environmental effects of a commercial product. Sharing information and the project’s findings is the responsibility of the research platform Textile ETP.
Clothing retailers like Decathlon as well as textile associations like Euratex or the fibre producer Lenzing are examples of other partner entities.
Cisutac has launched three pilot projects, the first of which aims to maximise the value of pre-existing objects, particularly for reuse. The second is about avoiding mistakes, such adding the wrong materials, when separating textiles for recycling. The most recent pilot programme makes an effort to lessen the amount of manual labour and the level of staff knowledge needed for sorting, dismantling, and repair. The pilots’ scope is remarkably extensive, spanning about 90 per cent of all textile fibres, including cotton and polyester, as well as the three industries of fashion apparel, sports and outdoor wear, and workwear.
