The European Defence Agency is running an Incubation Forum for Circular Economy in Defence (IF CEED) aimed to have a structured approach for boosting the transition to the Circular Economy in the defence sector. The activities of IF CEED are organised around 9 themes, including one on textile. To this end, IF CEED brings together Ministries of Defence, the European Commission, other relevant public bodies, industry, research & technology organisations and universities essentially with the aim to incubate collaborative/transnational projects ideas and/or roadmaps.
The Circularity of Smart Textiles workshop, as part of the textile theme, focused mostly on how to bring circularity concepts and recycling technologies to technical and smart textile products used in the defence sector.
Our Secretary General Lutz Walter was invited to give the keynote speech, an opportunity for Textile ETP to discuss the challenges of circularity of technical and smart textiles. The sessions then continued with speakers and participants discussing the pre-evaluation of circularity levels by design (especially for textronic-based textiles), and analyzed how to avoid contamination, presence of impurities and degradation in the textile recycling processes.
Further key elements can be found in the IF CEED website and IF CEED factsheet.
