CISUTAC will tackle current bottlenecks in the transition to circular textiles and clothing. For scale and significance, we focus on polyester, cotton & cellulosic fibres (together ca. 90% of textile materials) and products from 3 sub-sectors: garments, active goods and workwear. In this way, we will have a representative view on the challenges the textile sector is facing for circular transition. CISUTAC follows a holistic approach covering the technical, sectoral and socio-economic levels. We will provide systemic innovations at these levels and perform 3 pilots to demonstrate their feasibility and value: (i) Repair and disassembly; (ii) Sorting for reuse and recycling; (iii) Circular garments through fibre to fibre recycling and design for circularity. To realise these pilots, we will develop semi-automated workstations, analyse infrastructure and material flow, digitally enhance sorting operations and setup interventions with consumers. After the piloting phase, attention will be on the uptake of the results, by the sector, by the wider stakeholder group as well by the consumers. With (worldwide) leading brands and companies, CSOs, RTOs and EU associations, CISUTAC is truly EU-wide and covers the full novel circular value chain. Through the consortium, and further supported by the Transition Support Group with zz members, CISUTAC is strongly linked to ongoing initiatives allowing synergies and joint activities. This is essential for our implementation but also for leveraging the impact and enabling the shift towards a sustainable EU textiles & clothing, underpinned by circular material flows and supported by the wider stakeholders. CISUTAC will bring significant impact of scale via its innovations on repair, dismantling, sorting and fibre-to-fibre recycling. Realising this impact will lead to a reduction of ca. 975ktonCO2eq yearly and to new business activities and markets that together have a value of ca. €250mio and lead to ca. 1300 FTE, also social economy.

Over the years, fashion industries have played and continue to play key role in the competitiveness of the European economy. With almost 850 000 companies, 5 million jobs, and another 3 million jobs to be found throughout the supply chain, the Fashion industry can contribute to further economic growth and a strengthening of the competitive position of the EU economy as a whole.Due to pressures for change resulting notably from trade liberalization and increasing external competition, consumer developments, technological advances, changes in production costs and environmental issues, the fashion industries are characterized by continuing restructuring and modernization. This change indeed requires a more qualified workforce to deal with new technologies, stimulate innovation, ensure quality management and develop international strategies and marketing. Therefore, the availability of adequately skilled workers has become one of the major issues for the fashion industries. Fashion industries faced the shortage of trained and qualified personnel for their export and fashion marketing departments. Recognizing their critical role, recent European efforts, such as the European Skills Council of Textile Clothing Leather & Footwear and the European Fashion Industries Alliance, have come together in order to strengthen the comparative advantages of the fashion industries which include, among others, the well-educated and high-skilled professional workforce of the industry. Other factors include the rapid advance of digital technologies, the globalisation of networks and the deregulation of media. Employees from the fashion industries, students and SME’s, who would like to succeed, have to adapt to globalised market and ICT-based vocational education and training. Therefore a precise and effective ICT training tool for development, enhancement and boost of their transversal skills, is inevitably demanding.Fashion industries also need a flexible workforce that can respond to the development and the globalized market and the trend and need for internationalization. The workforce needs to be well qualified and ready to face the increased competition and rapid technological changes. To be compete in the global market fashion industries have to be smarter and able to adapt to changes. To achieve this, fashion industries need new education and training systems and tools for their existing and potential workforce in order to respond to the demands of the labour market and the global competition. In a framework of global competition, innovation and development are crucial elements to provide fresh impetus to a sustainable and competitive industry.In this context, the proposed project aims to design and develop an innovative and comprehensive training tool for export personnel of fashion industries, using ICT-based learning approaches and methodologies that will offer essential transversal skills for enabling them be ready to respond to international trade and market demands and enhancing the extroversion and the competitiveness of the industry as a whole. Bringing together the different sectors of fashion industries, the proposed tool will follow a comprehensive learner-centered approach based on acquired knowledge, skills and competences, in line with the European Qualification Framework (EQF). The objective of the proposed project is the design and implementation of an innovative and comprehensive training tool. Work-based training ICT tools in fashion industries are generally very outdated. They exist, but their availability is often not sufficient, the content is out-of-date and its distribution is not organised satisfactorily. Majority of present information materials regarding exports and global market information are at disposal only in paper form and most of them don’t cover modern trends, materials and fashion. Therefore, such a professional tool is considered extremely useful, since it helps to enhance the international extroversion of the sector especially for SME’s. The platform will focus on online training and will facilitate dissemination of knowledge and sharing of experience. Moreover, it will serve as a medium for all stakeholders in the field to share concerns and advice, as well as promote employment opportunities.The platform will respond to fashion marketing skills and for that scope will concentrate information and data regarding third countries market mechanisms and their function market’s technical requirements, recent trends of fashion marketing and expo’s evaluation in the global market, market’s development, development of the demand of sector’ s products, consumer’s behaviors and habits, trend analysis, demand chain, mechanisms for directs distribution of a product to international markets (by identifying customers;meeting their needs; implementing sales plans).

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.

"For Textiles Sector's companies (especially SMEs), the circular economy provides an opportunity to create new profit streams, increase their resilience to volatile input costs, and support their efforts to become completely sustainable and socially responsible. The market for ""green textiles"" is in an expanding development, reflecting the big change in the consumer behaviour, worldwide, representing a huge opportunity of growth for the Textiles sector in Europe. Global waste and environmental impacts that textiles and apparel production create, can be reduced through the design and manufacturing of products that follow circular economy guidelines or the creation of products with a low carbon impact. That said, a number of barriers will need to be overcome in order for the circular economy in the Textiles sector to become a reality. Skilled and well qualified workers can play a critical role in addressing these barriers and creating opportunities to guide the shift to circularity. Indeed, the Textiles' Sector requires a more qualified workforce to deal with new technologies, stimulate innovation, ensure quality management and develop international strategies and marketing. Therefore, the availability of adequately skilled workers has become one of the major issues for the Textiles industry as the majority of the companies still faced the shortage of trained and qualified personnel in green and circular economy techniques in both design and manufacturing. This segment of textiles is constituted by SMEs without qualified resources in the matter of sustainability, for whom it's important to develop competences and skills in this field. EU Textile industries urgently need a flexible workforce that can respond to the development and the globalized market and the need for sustainable design and manufacturing in order to respond to the global demand for sustainable creative products. Although there is no standardized approach to engage circular economy practices in textiles sector, there are many creative solutions being explored. In this frame the main objective of the project ECO-TEX is to design, develop and piloting a new job qualification profile and correspondent training curricula on the subject of ""How to implement circular economy techniques in Textiles Industry"" able to cope with the visible shortage of vocational skills, potentiating the best use of the outcomes in the field of design patterns, use of recycle materials, machinery, processes, developed in the frame of other EU and non EU funded Research & Development Projects with sustainable purposes, improving competitiveness in Textiles, based on the development of skills and competences of the workforce. As many studies show ""education for a circular economy does not simply bail down to just more time spent on ""economy literacy"" and systems literacy - it's the mindset around why this is important and the vision that underpins this mindset"". The project's specific objectives are the following: - To develop a deep knowledge on occupation and training needs to implement sustainable manufacturing in Textiles Sector and possible already existing learning opportunities; - To develop a new occupation/qualification profile of the expert in sustainability, capable to deal with all the frameworks around sustainability; - To develop a training toolkit able to cope with the identified training needs, according to European Common Framework on Vocation, Educational Training (ECVET); - To develop innovative training units; - To development the e-learning courses; - To develop the digital training platform as an innovative open distance - learning ICT tool - To pilot the results; - To create awareness for the need of a sustainable manufacturing strategy; - To exploit results through European, national and local networks and platforms, enterprises, business organisations, guidance organisations, as well as other relevant media, inside and outside Europe. - To enlarge the networking between the partners."

SOLSTICE aims at demonstrating 4 replicable systemic solutions for the territorial deployment of the circular economy (CEC) for the major industrial sector of textiles (62Mt produced/year). All steps of waste prevention and management will be included in a 5R strategy: Refuse/Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Repurpose, Recycle. The solutions developed can be replicated and cross-linked with the plastics value chain. SOLSTICE will: • Develop tools and strategies to implement the 5R approach: oFor the 4R Refuse/Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Repurpose: - Engage the different stakeholders (industrial companies, local authorities, citizens) to revise their supply chains / behaviour, and become more sober, circular and sustainable. - Scope and map current state, carry research on and analysis of relevant circular interventions per territory, - Create a methodology and blueprints of CEC interventions to be tested/piloted - Define circular guidelines and indicators oRecycle: Demonstrate innovative chemical recycling technologies, able to treat efficiently part of the major streams of polymers in textiles and plastics (PET, elastane, polyamide, polyurethane) in mild conditions. The technologies allow to recycle multicomponent and bio-based materials, complex streams, and to recycle textile into textile or coating into coating (closed-loop) or into added-value applications (open loop). They are easily adaptable and allow a local recycling. • Set-up a traceability system based on a Digital Product Passport and designed in relation to existing initiatives. The demonstration will take place in 4 EU representative and complementary territories. Knowledge-transfer and cooperation between the cities and regions involved, and with CCRI and other stakeholders and projects, will ensure an optimised development and deployment of the new circular concepts, as well as the replicability of the concept and a maximal impact. The deployment of SOLSTICE could save 4.3-10.8 Mt GHG emissions/year by 2030.