Trash2Cash

The project:

Within Trash-2-Cash, growing problems with paper fibre waste from the paper industry and textile fibre waste, originating from a continuously increasing textile consumption, will be solved through design-driven innovation. This will be performed by using the wastes to regenerate fibres that will be included into fashion, interior and other products. The cotton production suffers from non-sustainable environmental and socio-economical issues and the polyester fibre manufacture produces waste that to date has no viable deposition.

A cross-disciplinary and cross-sectorial consortium representing designers, scientists, raw-material suppliers and end-product manufacturers has been formed in order to develop novel design-driven innovative materials and products through utilization of waste streams.

The objectives are to:

• Integrate design, business and technology to a coherent discipline to establish new creative industries.

• Develop new materials and products via creative design from waste or process by-products.

• Reduce the utilization of virgin materials; improve material efficiency; decrease landfill volumes and energy consumption.

• Use design for recycling with the vision of closing the material loop.

• Create new business opportunities by adding the return loop of the discarded goods to be reused into attractive products.

• Promote development of the creative sector by providing technological solutions for exploitation of waste streams.

CIDETEC acts as leader of a work package of the project (WP5: Prototyping, testing and showcasing). Apart from this role, CIDETEC is in charge of several key technical tasks and activities, including:

• The use of cotton/polyester textiles recycled from waste in thermoset composites, based on recyclable Polyurethane or Epoxy resins. In combination with the thermoset resins, the recycled textile can be used as reinforcement material, but also as a basis to develop innovative waterproof garments or decorative skins for automotive plastic parts.

• The application of decorative and functional finishes to the recycled materials developed in the project by different technologies including laser treatments.