Eighteen companies and organisations have been given the first ever ITMF Awards. These were given away at the ITMF Annual Conference, held at Davos in Switzerland, in two categories—'Sustainability & Innovation' and 'International Cooperation'.
The awards:
- The objective of the ITMF Sustainability & Innovation Award is to recognise sustainable and innovative achievements in the textile industry with focus on innovation, design, development, and production under the strictest standards of sustainability and respect for the environment.
- The objective of the ITMF International Cooperation Award is to recognise progress in the area of international collaboration in the textile industry according to the values of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The awardees:
The 2022 ITMF Sustainability & Innovation Award was presented to the following organisations from different regions from around the world:
- Cathay Biotech Inc. with Donghua University (China);
- Far Eastern New Century Corporation (Chinese Taipei);
- Gama Recycle Sustainable Technologies Inc. (Türkiye);
- Grupo Malwee (Brazil);
- Lenzing AG (Austria);
- Mahmood Group (Pakistan);
- PSG College of Technology (India);
- Recover - Circular Fashion for All (Spain);
- Sedo Engineering (Switzerland);
- The Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel (Hong Kong, China).
The 2022 ITMF International Cooperation Award was presented to the following companies from different regions from around the world (alphabetical order):
- Bossa (Türkiye);
- Coloro (China);
- Ekoten Tekstil & Smartex.ai (Türkiye);
- EURATEX (Belgium);
- Säntis Textiles (Singapore) & Kipas Textiles (Türkiye);
- STAR-NETWORK;
- Texfor (Spain);
- Wiser Globe (Türkiye).
The jury: The jury was made up of the following:
- Chairman: Juan Pares, Textil Santanderina, AIPTA, ITMF Vice-President (Spain);
- Mustafa Denizer, Diktas, TTEA, ITMF Board Member (Turkey);
- Xu Yingxin, CNTAC, ITMF Board Member (China);
- Tae Jin Kang, Prof. Emeritus, Seoul National University, ITMF Board Member (Korea Rep.);
- Thomas Gries, Professor, RWTH Aachen University, ITA (Germany);
- Paulo Coutinho, SENAI CETIQT, ABIT (Brazil);
- R Alagirusamy, Professor, Indian Institute of Technology (India);
- Fu Guangwei, Director General, China Textile Engineering Society (China);
- Juan Marcos Sanz Casado, Director R & D, Textil Santanderina (Spain);
- Secretary of the jury: Christian Schindler, Director General, ITMF.
EURATEX award: Exact details of the awards were not fully known at the time of publication. The EURATEX Twitter handle said that the organisation was awarded for its ReHubs initiative.
- EURATEX launched the Recycling Hubs (ReHubs) initiative to upcycle textile waste and scale up industrially the collecting, sorting, processing and recycling of pre-consumer and post-consumer materials across Europe.
