Textiles for clothing are a major user of plastics, in which the plastic component is frequently combined with natural fibres such as cotton and wool. Globally, 438 million tonnes of plastic were produced in 2017, of which 62 M tonnes were used in the textile industry (compared with 158 M tonnes used in plastic packaging). Plastics in textile waste are thus a major, but hidden, contributor to the plastic waste issue. In the UK, 2.5 M tonnes of plastic packaging and >1 M tonnes of textile waste are generated annually. While plastic packaging has attracted attention and concern worldwide for some time, textile waste has only become prominent recently, in part because separating the plastic from the natural fibres and other components makes recycling textile waste a challenging task. A 2016 UK survey showed that textile waste goes to landfills 55%, incineration 26% and recycling/reusing 16%, with <1% textile waste used to generate material to be used for producing new clothing. Apart from old clothes recycled or reused via charity organisations, the majority of the plastic used in the textile industry is not recycled, contributing to plastic pollution and depletion of raw materials. If the plastic component (mainly polyester) can be separated from cotton, dye and other components in the textile waste, it can be recycled into reclaimed fibres using the same method for recycling plastic bottles into textile products. Existing mechanical recycling technology can recycle textile waste composed of a single polymer, but is not able to treat complex textiles such as polycotton garments (a mixture of polyester and cotton). Chemical recycling methods break down the textile fibres into their building blocks and then synthesise new polymers and subsequently new fibres via appropriate spinning techniques. But chemical recycling is energy intensive and natural fibres, such as cotton (formed of cellulose) and wool (protein fibre), are degraded to a point that they cannot be used to generate new fibre, therefore losing their intrinsic value. Researchers at the University of Huddersfield have recently developed an enzyme-assisted textile waste valorisation process that breaks down cellulose into glucose for biofuel fermentations, allowing recycling of the remaining polyester. The proposed project will modify this enzymatic approach to only partially break down cellulose to enable its separation from the polyester in polycotton, such that both components can be recovered and re-spun into new textile fibres. The project will also apply ionic liquid extraction for the separation of cellulose from plastics, separately and in combination with enzyme processing. Ionic liquids can dissolve cellulose, but the high price of commonly used ionic liquids have limited their commercial application. Researchers at Imperial College London have pioneered the development of more sustainable and cost effective ionic liquid extraction processes using much cheaper ionic liquids. The ionoSolv process for sustainable cellulose production was selected by Scientific American as one of the Top Ten Emerging Technologies of 2019 and is currently being commercialised for the fractionation of waste biomass by Lixea Ltd. (www.lixea.co) at a £4 million bespoke pilot plant in Sweden. In this project, ionoSolv technology will be applied to recover both the natural cellulose fibres and the dyes from waste textiles, in forms suitable for reuse in new textile products. The recycled polyester and cellulose will be re-spun into fibre at the Technical Textile Research Centre at the University of Huddersfield. The regenerated fibre will then be used by the industrial partner to demonstrate its suitability for making new textile products. The economic, social and environmental impacts of the novel process will be assessed for its benefits to stakeholders throughout the value chain - recyclers, manufacturing industries, retailers, consumers and society as a whole.

The fashion and textile sector is a major contributor to UK GDP, but the global industry is a major contributor to carbon emissions and other negative environmental impacts, including generation of thousands of tonnes of textile waste incinerated/landfilled in the UK every year. With UK fashion consumption continuing to rise, there is a pressing need to develop strategy for sustainable transformation, which means first establishing a clear picture of the current state of the industry's full environmental impacts, particularly as it relates to the UK. This large interdisciplinary Network will determine how to assess, evidence, and monitor the sustainability credentials of current and proposed practices across the fashion and textile industry to ensure congruence with Net Zero targets. The work will identify the sectoral, disciplinary, technical, cultural, and skills-based barriers to transitioning to more sustainable practices, as well as those areas where specific interventions could result in the highest impacts, to decide where best to target future innovation and priorities. The Network will also take account of ongoing disconnects between design, manufacturing, retail, use and end-of-life disposal that contribute to environmental impacts. A robust, accurate and honest picture of the current 'baseline' position of the industry will be presented, from which the best strategy to meet Net Zero and other mandated targets can be based.

Consumer Experience (CX) Digital Tools for Dematerialisation for the Circular Economy - for the design of a new generation of 'Product Cultures' that promote human wellbeing and people's agency in environmental sustainability The much expounded sustainability strategy of dematerialisation - buying less and extending the life of products - is now starting to gain significant traction in the general consciousness on account of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our eco-design strategy for dematerialisation is focused on gaining a fine grained understanding of human experience in order to extend 'product offerings' that would decouple the use of material resources from human wellbeing and economic development, by designing experiences and services related to products that include care, update/upgrade, repair, and recycling. The central idea is that by designing experiences and services for products, value that is based on human wellbeing needs can be added to them. We aim to shape new cultures of consumption that will meet the demands of the market for greater sustainability, whilst giving consumers greater agency to respect their environment - becoming custodians rather than consumers. This requires a new relationship between consumers and their products. We believe that experiences and services for products must be constituents of this relationship, hence the challenge is to translate our understanding of needs related to human wellbeing into the design of product-experience-service offerings. We will innovate CX Digital Tools to support experiences and services for physical apparel products that are related to care, repair and update/upgrade in order to keep apparel in use for as long as possible. We will define a set of scenarios and associated technologies for new cultures of CE, by gaining understanding of how social and digital actors (the consumer-public, charity shops, repair initiatives, clothes swapping initiatives, apparel brands, retailers, and digital-electronics hacker communities) come together to enact a CE. We will innovate new sensing and perceptual technologies based on novel computer vision and machine learning architecture to be used by consumers to understand materials and materials degradation, to make decisions of material reparation and to express their perceptions around aged, repaired, updated/upgraded products. We will evaluate user interactions and perceptions derived from scenarios, with a methodological contribution to the evaluation that combines our HCI, social sciences, design and phenomenological approaches. The CX Digital Tools is designed and specified using our Circular Experience Model we have conceptualised, which has four categories: 1) Pre-Ownership; 2) During Ownership; 3) Giving up Ownership; 4) Post Ownership. We will use these four categories to design a set of experiences and services for apparel products that are focused on the human perceptual experience of materials - specifically, materials from waste and recycled materials, ageing and wear, repair, and update/upgrade. We will adopt a Citizen Science approach in order to design and test experiences and services with consumers and stakeholders. Through this approach we will ensure that we are reducing the need to develop new technology products, as we will seek to work with digital technologies that consumers already possess, which forms part of our approach to mitigate environmental impacts both in our research programme as in the outcomes of it. This 30 month project will be led by the Materials Science Research Centre at the Royal College of Art in partnership with UCL - the University College London Interaction Centre, Computer Science Department, and the Knowledge Lab.

The Collaborative Research & Development (R&D) Partnership project will work with the Fashion Textiles and related Technology (FTT) industry in order develop research-led solutions to business growth, technological and consumer change. This will include working closely with small firms who make up the vast majority (80+%) of the sector, in fashion design, designer-making, manufacturing, retail and in related services that are fed by the fashion & textiles sector, e.g. events, interiors, publishing, performing arts, media and other creative services, as well as a wide range of textiles applications in manufacturing, medical and product design. The research will be delivered by a partnership between several universities led by the University of the Arts London, who together specialise in fashion and textiles design, business, manufacture and marketing, including specialist research centres in sustainable fashion and circular design, sustainable prosperity, materials and textiles manufacturing, in London, Leeds, Loughborough and Cambridge. The R&D project will be based around the East London Fashion & Textiles cluster and the connected production growth corridors of the Thames Gateway and Lea Valley/M11 (London-Cambridge) where opportunities for FTT workspace and manufacturing expansion are evident. The R&D work programme will include short and longer term research projects and enterprise support with small firms/SMEs to identify and develop solutions to the growth of their business, products and markets and related skills needs; work with larger fashion brands to develop more sustainable products through innovative design, manufacture and waste processing; research consumer experience and needs in material/fashion brands and retailing, including the future place of high street retail, store design and online markets; test new and existing synthetic and natural materials for new product development; and explore markets for more sustainable UK fibres/chemical processes and opportunities for regional UK textile production. The R&D programme, which will be co-designed with FTT companies and industry associations, will also identify the related skill and training needs which accompany the economic and technological challenges facing the FTT industry, and design through the university partners and other training providers (e.g. FE Colleges) and enterprise support organisations, new and novel training and Continuing Professional Development programmes.

The UK is known for its successful creative industries and its fashion designers are widely acknowledged as creative influencers on the world stage. The UK's designer fashion sector, largely made up of micro and small enterprises (MSEs), constitutes a globally recognised creative engine, effectively acting as R&D for the wider fashion industry. Design-led fashion enterprises, whilst often struggling financially themselves, provide pioneering alternative visions of prosperity in business. This project investigates the role of creative entrepreneurship and design in fashion MSEs as a potential driver for change, providing a valuable lens through which to examine the future for a sustainable fashion industry. A multi-disciplinary research team will work directly with a range of design-led fashion MSEs as co-producers of the research. The fashion designer-entrepreneur, and leaders in MSE teams, will be the focus of analysis. The research will explore sustainability as a creative endeavour, examining four key areas: design and operations; business networks and ecosystems; working practices; entrepreneurship and business models. This will lead to new knowledge and understanding of the internal operations and external context within which these fashion MSEs operate. This knowledge will be applied to establish and support new sustainable models of business development, repositioning designer fashion MSEs as major contributors to the UK's creative and sustainable economy, and ultimately informing future UK policy for the creative industries. The research will analyse existing and novel business models and practices that foster sustainable prosperity, a concept aiming to balance environmental, social, cultural and economic considerations. We will identify barriers and points of intervention in order to develop alternative business support mechanisms for sustainability to inform fashion businesses at both small and larger scales. To meet this complex challenge, the academic team is drawn from three leading research centres and universities, whose complementary academic expertise will provide a novel cross-disciplinary approach to research in fashion innovation and sustainable prosperity. Led by London College of Fashion (LCF) at University of the Arts London (UAL), the project is a collaboration between UAL's Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF), Middlesex University's (MU) Centre for Enterprise and Economic Development Research (CEEDR) and the Open University's (OU) Department of Design. CEEDR is a key partner in Surrey University's Centre for Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). To maximize the impact of the project directly on the fashion sector, the research team will work closely with the Centre for Fashion Enterprise (CFE), a fashion business incubator based at LCF (est. 2003); the British Fashion Council (BFC), the UK industry body responsible for promoting international sales of designer fashion; and the Ethical Fashion Forum (est. 2005), an alternative sourcing platform for international fashion MSEs working with sustainability. The research team will also work with a group of 20 designer fashion MSEs who want to engage with sustainability practices. Four key project partners will provide current examples of different business models incorporating sustainability: Unmade, Christopher Raeburn, Martine Jarlgaard and RizBoardshorts. These four MSE partners will engage with the research team in knowledge exchange and evaluation throughout the entire project. Outputs will include: case studies, academic journal articles, key findings report, and policy briefing note. In addition, a business support for sustainability 'toolkit' will provide new guidance for both emerging and established business support and incubator organisations (eg. CFE, BFC, Fashion in Leeds initiative) to foster more sustainable fashion practices.