In EU a garment is worn an average of 3 times in its life, with €400 Bln lost a year discarding clothes which can still be worn and 92 Mln tons of waste, 87% of clothes ending up in landfills. But due to growing awareness on ethical and environmental impacts, 66% of consumers are ready to pay more for sustainable products . TRICK will provide a complete, SME affordable and standardised platform to support the adoption of sustainable and circular approaches: it will enable enterprises to collect product data and to access to the necessary services on a dedicated marketplace, open to third party solutions. TRICK demo will be run in 2 highly complex and polluting domains: textile-clothing as main pilot and perishable food for replication. EC estimates that up to 10% of the 88 million tons of food waste generated annually in the EU are linked to date marking, with associated costs estimated at €143 billion. Secured traceability will rely on the data needed for the preferential certification of origin (PCO), used for duty calculation. It will be certified by Customs as member of the consortium, representing anti fraud public forces. The data extracted by the fiscal documents for the PCO will be integrated with the bill of materials, saved in the Blockchains (BC) per each lot of production to grant traceability continuity, and with the additional ones to enable the six services provided by TRICK: traceability, circular assessment, PEF, health and social assessment, A.I. for anti counterfeting. BC will secure information through the whole process, ending to consumers for informed purchasing. Data confidentiality and privacy will be granted by the exploitation of Blockchains smart contracts while the adoption of different technologies will be solved by the development of Blockchain interoperability connectors between the two BC providers. End users will cover the whole TC value chain, from raw materials to recycling.

SmartX will match smart textiles technology with end market demand by filling the current industrial manufacturing gap. To realise this, SmartX will establish a novel industrial value chain composed of SMEs and start-ups from textiles, design, (micro)electronics, data processing, IoT, manufacturing technology, distribution and end user sectors. The SmartX core activity is the funding a portfolio of Trailblazer innovation projects involving at least 40 SMEs, which will pioneer one or more stages of the novel smart textiles value chain. Independent external experts will select these small cross-sectorial, cross-cultural and cross-regional innovation actions that will be co-funded by SmartX via an open call system. The projects will be supported from start to end via the SmartX Coaching Approach covering all relevant multidisciplinary aspects and delivered by specially trained cluster managers. We will focus on protective wear, industrial applications and healthcare & wellbeing end markets. Trailblazer project formation will be supported by an open collaboration platform (target > 150 company members) that will support smart textiles value chain building. The platform will be maintained and extended beyond smartX. We will build on the successful WORTH project for implementing small funding schemes. We will apply the award-winning Innovation Potential Audit and will link with REGIOTEX, a thematic partnership of 15 regions under the S3 Platform on Industrial Modernisation to leverage follow up funding. SmartX unites 8 clusters (accessing over 60.000 SMEs across Europe), 2 RTOs (for technological assistance) and 3 innovation support entities. The wearables market is estimated at ca €150 billion (2026). Assuming smart textiles will take 10%, the new value chain targeted by SmartX represents in Europe ca €5.5 billion or ca 22.000 jobs. US and Asia are setting up significant public and private investments, so European action is needed not to miss this value and job creating opportunity.

HEREWEAR innovates with a holistic, systemic approach towards the creation of an EU market for locally-produced circular textiles and clothing made from bio-based waste. New material solutions will build on the latest bio-based polyesters and cellulose developments. Three novel waste streams (seaweed, manure, straw) will be developed for cellulosic textile fibres. Emerging sustainable technologies for wet and melt spinning, for yarn and fabric making, will be developed and piloted at semi-industrial scale. For finishing innovation, coating and colouring biobased agents will be evolved. Microfibre release will be significantly reduced via measures all along the textile manufacturing process. Garment prototypes for streetwear and corporate clothing will be produced by connecting up microfactories, organised into regional value creation circles; or by platform-supported, networked production resources. Use phase and end-of-life processing management - repair, re-use, recycle - will be implemented through novel structures. Full transparency will be provided through blockchain-enabled labelling and the configuration of a digital twin, informed with LCA information. A database and guidelines will be produced to support the design of fashion goods; with a focus on the best performance for bio-based materials and for reuse/recycling. Further guidelines will help the industry to take-up these results. The consortium includes 6 research organisations, 1 LE and 8 SMEs coming from EU and 1 from US. To maximise impact, we will build on the TCBL community (>240 sustainable textile businesses) and use the SOURCEBOOK platform (>25000 organisations). Via these networks, blueprints for the transition to bio-based circular textiles will be shared and implemented. That way HEREWEAR aims to establish a bio-based circular textile clothing market segment of ca. €300 million, thus trying to maintain ca. 1200 textile manufacturing jobs in EU.

Covid-19 has shown that unpredictable events can disrupt supply chains, demand, and induce work restrictions, which can be detrimental to the manufacturing sector, significantly affecting growth. Especially, when medium or high-volume manufacturing is considered, resilience can only be achieved through rapid reconfigurability and digitalization. Rapid reconfigurability must be addressed in all production levels, ranging from the factory to the machinery and to each individual process step, as well as the interaction with the supply chain. The objective of R3GROUP is to develop and demonstrate resilience strategies for reconfiguration. The project will carry out industrial demonstrators in diverse manufacturing sectors (automotive, fabricated metal products, rubber and plastics, wearing apparel, home appliances) facing various reconfiguration issues (scale up or down, introduction of new suppliers, accommodation of multiple product variants, resilience to unforeseen events), engaging end-users operating with different business models (B2B, B2C) and on different positions in the value chain (OEM, Tier 1). R3GROUP will follow the 6 reconfigurability principles to develop technologies in 5 pillars towards resilience through reconfigurability: i) release an AAS-enabled platform for horizontal and vertical integrability for reconfigurability; ii) develop production tools and technologies, through the reconfigurable machine tool concept; iii) deploy a digital toolkit supporting rapid evaluation of reconfiguration impacts, using multi-level digital twins; iv) integrate innovative tools to capture the trigger for reconfiguration that provide awareness on the status of the rest of the value chain (supply chain, market); v) multi-level monitoring, control, and quality assessment to mitigate the reconfiguration impact. Finally, R3GROUP will develop human-centred solutions and put special focus on reskilling to support the adoption of novel technologies.