Cooperation platform KlarTEXt

2 to 10 percent of the EU's environmental impact is attributable to clothing consumption. The EU is therefore initiating a transformation of the textile industry with the Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles (EU-SnkT) and is calling for sustainable and circular textiles. The necessary transformation poses major challenges for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in this sector in Germany. The new cooperation platform "KlarTEXt" has therefore set itself the goal of bringing together players from the textile industry and textile science in order to pool the need for innovation, identify obstacles to a sustainable textile industry and develop and implement measures for a socially and ecologically sustainable textile industry.

The EU strategy calls for the use and disposal of textile products to be improved on the one hand and the discharge of fibrous microplastics to be minimized on the other. Another major challenge in the textile industry is that there are currently no uniform specifications or solutions for ecodesign requirements such as resource efficiency or recycling alone.

This is where the "KlarTEXt" cooperation platform comes in: Stakeholders from industry and science network and promote an intensive transfer of knowledge in the research fields of textile materials, functions, circularity and resource efficiency in the textile industry. SMEs can then access this knowledge to make their textiles more sustainable. This enables them to increase their company's innovative strength in this section and at the same time create future viable jobs in a sustainable textile circular economy.

In addition, information about the circular textile economy is to be made available to various social target groups - from children, young people and students to interested professionals. The aim is to inform consumers about the background, interrelationships and key developments in the textile industry, such as sustainable functionalization, repair and reuse, alternative sustainable materials and value chains. The project partners implement this with various measures such as workshops, summer schools, targeted training, conferences, educational material or special link tanks. Future innovations in the textile sector from the sections of biopolymers and biotechnology can gain relevance for the textile industry through this targeted information.

Through numerous workshops, interactive events and the digital networking platform, the project partners are creating the necessary conditions to bring the topic of closer to the various target groups and close the gap between business, science and society.

• Hochschule Niederrhein- FTB Research Institute for Textiles and Clothing
• DWI Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials