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Textile fibre recycling from mixed streams of PESCO textiles

Project description

Sorting out Europe’s textile waste crisis

Europe faces an extensive textile waste problem, annually generating more than 7 million tonnes of discarded fabrics. Despite this volume, only about 35 % is collected separately, with less than 1 % being recycled into new clothing. Most of this waste comprises cotton, polyester, or their blends, with considerable amounts of CO/PES blends being disposed of yearly due to technical and economic hurdles in recycling. In this context, the EU-funded PESCO-UP project is dedicated to developing a sustainable and economically viable process to upcycle mixed CO/PES textile waste into new cotton and polyester products. Through advanced sorting, purification, and separation technologies, PESCO-UP aims to transform this waste into valuable resources.

Objective

Europe has an extensive textile waste problem - annually 7 –7.5 million tons of textile waste is generated, but only about 30 - 35 % of the generated waste is collected separately and less than 1% is recycled into new clothing. Collection of textile waste will become mandatory in EU member states by 2025. Most of the textile are cotton, polyester, or their blends. Considerable amounts of CO/PES blends are disposed every year due to the technical challenge and/or economic viability of recycling.

The objective of PESCO-UP is to develop a sustainable and economically and technologically viable process of the mixed CO/PES textile waste to be upcycled into cotton originated and polyester products. The processes should enable for production of new products without quality restriction and of products with identical properties and performances as those produced using primary resources. The main tools to achieve this are the development of automated identification and sorting methods for textiles, Digital Product Passport with a marketplace-style dataspace for sharing data describing material streams to support matching of supply and demand of textile materials, and the process development of purification, separation technologies as well as the technologies that utilize the separated cotton and PES fractions for the valuable products.

PESCO-UP will ensure that sustainable fiber-to-fiber recycling becomes a reality in Europe. This will turn a societal waste problem into a business opportunity for European SMEs and bring the textile industry back to Europe. At the same time dependency on oil and cotton based raw materials will decrease, which will mean reduction in CO2 emission and reduced water consumption. The use of developed digital methods and digital product passport can be widened in other industrial sectors to solve their recycling and sustainability issues.

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HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) HORIZON-CL4-2023-TWIN-TRANSITION-01

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Coordinator

TEKNOLOGIAN TUTKIMUSKESKUS VTT OY
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 3 076 490,41
Address
TEKNIIKANTIE 21
02150 Espoo
Finland

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Region
Manner-Suomi Helsinki-Uusimaa Helsinki-Uusimaa
Activity type
Research Organisations
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Total cost

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Participants (22)

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