CITE (Circular Economy Innovative Initiative in Textile for an Entrepreneurial Europe) aims to create a new dynamic and agile ecosystem in and between higher education institutions that will boost textile circularity and circular economy in innovation and entrepreneurial courses.

CITE will exploit existing regional and international structures, programmes, and initiatives in order to teach circularity to entrepreneurs-to-be, with the ultimate goal of bringing key sustainable improvements into the entrepreneurial system.

The TRICK project developed technologies and related services that enable textile and fashion industry SMEs to manage transparency and traceability in their supply chains. The core of the project was the development of a complete, reliable, SME-affordable, and standardised platform for data collection, secured by Blockchain, to enable enterprises to collect product-secured data, combined with a marketplace including the needed services and the data generated, open to third parties’ certified solutions and business models.

During the first wave of the pandemic, the world faced a severe shortage of various textile protective equipment such as face masks, medical gowns, and body bags. To avoid similar situations during future events, the H2020 project Reservist targeted re-designing textile protective equipment for production via alternative lines.

The approach was to set up so-called ‘reservist cells’, that in times of crises can be activated within 48 hours to switch to produce the necessary products and services. The concept started from what is currently used in the military environment or also in humanitarian relief, where ‘rapid response teams' are constantly on standby, ready to be activated in case of a need. The basis was the RESERVIST network, a wide group of actors (companies, RTDs, enablers,… but also end-users) linked to providing medical equipment.

SmartX united eight clusters, two Research and Technology Organisations (for specific technological assistance), and three innovation support entities (for professional project initiation, implementation, and follow-up): together they reached out to over 60,000 SMEs all over Europe to build a dedicated community around SmartX.

This extremely large action range helped SmartX boost smart textiles innovation and develop an end-to-end smart textile manufacturing value chain in Europe, in order to drive promising prototypes faster to market.

Speedboat-C addressed the challenges of global, fragmented, and predominantly linear value chains in the clothing and textile industry, where materials and products are often sourced long distance, and less than 1% of all textiles are recycled into new textile fibres.

Project partners developed together a one-stop platform that eases and incentivises responsible decision-making for circular clothing design and production, providing automated recommendations and impact measurement to advance circularity, transparency, and reduce CO2 emissions in regional value chains.