STREP ambition is to empower the European textile (recycling) industry with a solution for sustainable processing of textile waste by developing and rolling out of a novel and systemic waste sorting solution based on cost-efficient sensor and automation technology, self-learning AI, as well as a novel solution for textile disintegration and mechanical recycling. Furthermore, STREP develops chemical recycling solutions, to facilitate the production of a 100% closed loop recycled yarn based exclusively on post-consumer textile waste, creating a perfect balance between sustainability, cost, and quality. The overall ambition is enhancing European industrial sustainability, competitiveness, and resource independence through producing more sustainable products, while increasing consumer benefits. STREP integrates value chain, product quality, and environmental impact perspectives in its different phases. Two of the innovations are placed in the pre-consumer phases. One of these relates to developing and testing guidelines and matrix that can support product design phase, and implementing recycling-friendly assembly of textile products. The other one innovates the traceability of the products and the related waste to enable allocating different product (waste) streams to the right flows and processing alternatives. The rest of the innovations are positioned after the textile waste collection and include: technology for recognition and removal of hardware and prints as well as characterizing the waste (fiber length, humidity, dirt, etc.), developing innovative recycling methods based on solvolysis, enzymatic processing, pyrolysis and hydrothermal conversion to treat the appropriate textile waste fractions depending on the composition and the length of the fibers. Targeted products are new fibers out of mechanical and chemical recycling processes as well as (bio-crude) oils and biochar out of the textile fibers that cannot be used in new fibers.

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.

The global consumption of textiles is increasing, with global production of the two most relevant fibres, cotton and polyester, expected to grow by 40% before 2023. There is also no EU-wide plan on how to deal with the existing and anticipated textile waste: currently less than 1% of the material used to produce clothing is recycled into new clothing in a closed-loop process while 87% is landfilled or incinerated. By January 2025 new EU Directive 2018/851 will require all member states to establish a separate household textile waste collection and respect increasing minimum recycling goals, but the pure legislative approach cannot alone solve the growing textile waste problem. Based on estimates from experts, we see that 1% of textile waste entering closed loops leads to 100B euros market loss each year. If a 30% recycling rate is reached (similar to average plastic packaging recycling rates), we will be able to valorize a 30 billion euros/year market. The ambition of T-REX is to contribute to a paradigm shift from household textile waste into desired feedstock. Moreover, we aim to demonstrate that this new commodity and the business models based on it can be completely implemented within the EU. By involving major players across the whole value chain, we aim to demonstrate that a new ecosystem approach, with harmonized methods and quality criteria, can lead to a better understanding of our current textile waste and therefore better upcycling rates into new garments. We also intend to demonstrate that such products can appeal to consumers while at the same time be designed for further recycling. Our goal is to reduce CO2 emissions by 30% across the complete value chain by 2030 by helping to end plastic waste. This project will arm the EU with a commercially viable option to tackle the textile waste and the environmental problems it causes, whilst offering new fields to explore for EU businesses, new know-how for our citizens and, new workforces for the future.