This year's edition of the Horizon Exploration Clothing Textiles was opened by our keynote speaker who joined us from his office in Japan, Oliver Shafaat, who captured the attention of the online public with his exposé on "brewed yarns".
Spiber’s Brewed Protein™: Man-made Protein Fibers for the Apparel Industry
Oliver Shafaat discussed the Spiber Inc. Brewed Protein™ production process leading to the creation of man-made fibers. He presented examples of the use of Brewed Protein in the apparel sector, and provided a future outlook on the possible applications of their technology. We invite you to have an inspiring look on their website
Sander De Vrieze, IPR consultant at Centexbel and textile engineer gave an overview of recently filed patent applications in the field of clothing, emphasizing two major points: the abundance of e-textile developments (predominantly patented by technology giants Microsoft and Apple) and the fact that due to the lead time of 18 months between the introduction of a patent application and publication, the patents on community masks and other covid-19 related inventions will only be visible in 2022.
In his presentation on evolutions in legislation and standards regarding apparel and clothing textiles, Edwin Maes, Consultant Clothing Textiles at Centexbel, who is also very active in the standardization committees targeted on clothing textiles, pointed to the many activities currently taking place in view of incorporating the concept of "circular economy" into standards at CEN and ISO and into EU legislation.
Filip Govaert, product certifier OEKO-TEX® at Centexbel, addressed the new limit values for the STANDARD 100 by OEKO-TEX® and discussed the possibility of certifying recycled materials within this standard.
Kris Van Peteghem, Fedustria, who also acted as the chair person of this horizon exploration, presented four cases of how Belgian textile companies have already implemented a circular approach:
- European Spinning Group with its #hackyourjeans project and hybrid online platforms Ariadne innovation and Ellie Connect. We kindly recommend to visit these websites.
- Dr. Green by Utexbel: circular flow of hospital textiles
- PurFI Circular Fiber Products: a Joint-Venture between Purfi (USA) and Concordia Textiles (BE) for the “rejuvenation” of textile products
- Sioen who put in place a whole series of activities aimed at a circular textile economy.
All four companies were also activily engaged in the Retex research project.
Ine De Vilder, researcher at Centexbel, closed the session with an overview of the preliminary results of the EU H2020 DECOAT project, inviting the audience to follow the progression of the project on the website by subscribing to the DECOAT newsletter.
We kindly invite you to join our next year's edition of the Horizon Exploration Clothing Textiles!