Today, no more than 40% of produced textiles are recycled, with only 1% in certain areas. By 2025, EU member states are obliged to implement a system to collect and separate post-consumer textiles (according to the new European Waste Framework Directive). This represents is a huge entrepreneurial potential to increase the reuse rates and recycling into higher value materials.
Financed by EIT Manufacturing (which is co-funded by the European Union), CITE will exploit existing regional and international structures, programmes, and initiatives (i.e. European Green Deal, Circular Regions, New European Bauhaus) in order to teach circularity to entrepreneurs-to-be, with the ultimate goal of bringing key sustainable improvements into the entrepreneurial system.
The outcomes of CITE will be scaled up to other Higher Education Institutions and regions (ideas, pilots, demos, initiatives and networks), and aims to impact the world of circular economy on a European level.
As part of the CITE consortium, led by RWTH Aachen University and composed of 5 other partners with industrial, entrepreneurial and innovative expertise, Textile ETP leads the dissemination activities of the project, ensuring high-impact digital communications that reach students, teachers and trainers in national, regional and local settings.
The full list of partners, covering 5 different EU and Associated countries, is available here.
More information on the CITE project on its webpage: www.textile-platform.eu/cite
