Textile Recycling as a Collaborative Effort: Texcircle Project Shows the Way

Two years can just fly away, before you realise. That would have meant precise coordination, and meeting of strict deadlines. How did you go about achieving this?
The project plan already provided several milestone meetings, followed by intermediate conferences and, depending on the needs, other exchanges within workshops. Besides that, the project was divided into three parallel thematics: building a local circular cluster, strengthening and optimising existing processes and developing prototypes to assess the feasibility. All three thematic focuses were separately managed but jointly discussed in the mentioned milestone meetings.

There were seven partners in all. Could you share how the workflow was implemented?
The Texcircle project group formed a cluster, in order to jointly meet the challenges we face for a circular textile economy. The project focused on shared materials/quantities and created prototypes to demonstrate the impact of secondary raw materials in products to show which processes need to be adapted for a circular economy. Some partners, for example, have fed leftover materials and post-consumer waste into the cluster, others have created semi-finished products (fleece or yarn), and others have developed products.

Besides the seven project partners, there were three network partners too. What was their role in the project?
The Federal Office for Civilian Service network partners, Nikin and TigerLiz Textiles, agreed to support the project with material donations and trials. In return, the network partners were invited to workshops to share the know-how acquired adequately.

The project page on your website says: "To future-proof textile production, we need to develop new sources of raw materials." Now that the project is complete, how do you think this will translate into broad action in the real manufacturing space?
To optimise the future value creation of textile waste for circular use, the recycling and sorting of used textiles will have to be reconsidered. In addition to the aspects of repair and remanufacture, recycling processes will lead to the development of new material flows. Considering new material flows from a design perspective is crucial to ensure success in the application. In the future, designers will have to be aware of the requirements and effects of recycling technologies to make firm decisions regarding their use in the final product. In the project, it became clear that besides the purely technical aspects, many criteria must be weighed against each other: functional, aesthetic, market-relevant and above all, ecological.

The website also says: "The aim is to close the life cycle of textile products so that the original materials can be efficiently reused as raw materials for new, high-quality products." How can the project ideas and solutions be implemented on the ground? Again, there are already many solutions that come in different shapes that can be implemented on different scales. Where does Texcircle stand on this? In that sense, how is Texcircle being positioned?
The project allows the partners to build up new value chains with the acquired know-how and to gradually replace the share of virgin fibres in their own products with recycled content. This requires the knowledge of circular economy models, the prototypes developed in the project in the sense of a feasibility study, and the local network that has been created, whereby local means partnerships throughout Europe. Since, as far as possible, all prototypes were implemented within industrial or semi-industrial processes, this approach now facilitates scaling for the partners.

For something of this sort to work out on the ground, there has to be one nodal point, or let's say one driving force. Broadly speaking, it has been brands and retailers who have been making the value chain work. Who is likely to drive the new product cycle?
The Texcircle project clarified that the existing value chains need to be rethought. Stakeholders will have to work together, and, to some extent, there will be a need to work outside the box. Both downstream and upstream, there will have to be some extension of in-house competencies at each step within the value chain to ensure a smooth transfer between stakeholders.

Designers will have to take on a communication expert role. In this role, it will be crucial to understand processes, materials, technologies, ecological aspects and the market. In this sense, the design will have a kind of hub role in the future, which must dock with all stakeholders to enable circular value creation.

In addition to the close cooperation of all stakeholders and a crucial role in the design, the emerging new EU regulations formulated within the Textile Strategy will have a sudden but positive impact on circular efforts in the sector.

The earlier Texcycle had given way to Texcircle. So, what are we likely to see next in the line? How do you see the learnings of the Texcycle project being transformed into action on the ground?
The project team is working with the cluster in the Texcircle project and new interested parties to set up a follow-up project to prepare the Swiss textile industry for transforming into a circular economy.

The two previous projects have clarified that more than mere process and material innovations are needed to move the sector towards the circular economy. A lot of effort has gone into many innovations of this kind in recent years. It is time for the textile industry to strategically orient itself towards the circular economy and drive this orientation forward with appropriate investments.

To increase the impact of the results from Texcircle, it is worthwhile to further develop the findings into higher-level, circular product strategies for Swiss companies in the textiles industry. The results of the Texcircle project are essential starting points for this, ultimately deriving sustainable circular product strategies for the companies. Future product strategies must be brand-logical and economically functional, be oriented towards state-of-the-art and political framework conditions, and be able to demonstrate their potential for improvement in a data-based manner via a life cycle assessment.

Also, the partners from Ruckstuhl, Rohner Socks, Nikin and TigerLiz Textiles are planning to release their first collections next year: building on the experiences within the project and integrating recycled content into their products to minimise their environmental footprint.