The Collaborative Research & Development (R&D) Partnership project will work with the Fashion Textiles and related Technology (FTT) industry in order develop research-led solutions to business growth, technological and consumer change. This will include working closely with small firms who make up the vast majority (80+%) of the sector, in fashion design, designer-making, manufacturing, retail and in related services that are fed by the fashion & textiles sector, e.g. events, interiors, publishing, performing arts, media and other creative services, as well as a wide range of textiles applications in manufacturing, medical and product design. The research will be delivered by a partnership between several universities led by the University of the Arts London, who together specialise in fashion and textiles design, business, manufacture and marketing, including specialist research centres in sustainable fashion and circular design, sustainable prosperity, materials and textiles manufacturing, in London, Leeds, Loughborough and Cambridge. The R&D project will be based around the East London Fashion & Textiles cluster and the connected production growth corridors of the Thames Gateway and Lea Valley/M11 (London-Cambridge) where opportunities for FTT workspace and manufacturing expansion are evident. The R&D work programme will include short and longer term research projects and enterprise support with small firms/SMEs to identify and develop solutions to the growth of their business, products and markets and related skills needs; work with larger fashion brands to develop more sustainable products through innovative design, manufacture and waste processing; research consumer experience and needs in material/fashion brands and retailing, including the future place of high street retail, store design and online markets; test new and existing synthetic and natural materials for new product development; and explore markets for more sustainable UK fibres/chemical processes and opportunities for regional UK textile production. The R&D programme, which will be co-designed with FTT companies and industry associations, will also identify the related skill and training needs which accompany the economic and technological challenges facing the FTT industry, and design through the university partners and other training providers (e.g. FE Colleges) and enterprise support organisations, new and novel training and Continuing Professional Development programmes.

The fashion design industry contributes £28bn or £50bn including indirect contributions, to the UK economy with a growing workforce of nearly 900,000 making it one of the largest creative industries in the country. This is an industry-led challenge in which designers will lead a highly creative process of applying, co-developing and implementing new textile and industrial digital technologies (IDTs) in collaboration with supply chain manufacturers and other technology experts, in the high value luxury textile and fashion sector. The R&D cluster will deliver exciting new creative innovation opportunities, new products, shorter product development and design lead times, reduced costs, and substantially increase global industrial competitiveness and productivity. The research focuses on developing new creative design processes, products, service and business models, linked to two key themes: 1. Digitally Connected and Sustainable Processes. 2. Digital Communication and Data Analytics. The R&D in both themes will also feed in to the creation of new fashion design degree and industrial apprenticeship programmes to address a skills gap in the industry for multidisciplinary STEAM-based designers, that possess a unique combination of art, design, science and technology competencies.

The fashion and textile sector is a major contributor to UK GDP, but the global industry is a major contributor to carbon emissions and other negative environmental impacts, including generation of thousands of tonnes of textile waste incinerated/landfilled in the UK every year. With UK fashion consumption continuing to rise, there is a pressing need to develop strategy for sustainable transformation, which means first establishing a clear picture of the current state of the industry's full environmental impacts, particularly as it relates to the UK. This large interdisciplinary Network will determine how to assess, evidence, and monitor the sustainability credentials of current and proposed practices across the fashion and textile industry to ensure congruence with Net Zero targets. The work will identify the sectoral, disciplinary, technical, cultural, and skills-based barriers to transitioning to more sustainable practices, as well as those areas where specific interventions could result in the highest impacts, to decide where best to target future innovation and priorities. The Network will also take account of ongoing disconnects between design, manufacturing, retail, use and end-of-life disposal that contribute to environmental impacts. A robust, accurate and honest picture of the current 'baseline' position of the industry will be presented, from which the best strategy to meet Net Zero and other mandated targets can be based.

Consumer Experience (CX) Digital Tools for Dematerialisation for the Circular Economy - for the design of a new generation of 'Product Cultures' that promote human wellbeing and people's agency in environmental sustainability The much expounded sustainability strategy of dematerialisation - buying less and extending the life of products - is now starting to gain significant traction in the general consciousness on account of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our eco-design strategy for dematerialisation is focused on gaining a fine grained understanding of human experience in order to extend 'product offerings' that would decouple the use of material resources from human wellbeing and economic development, by designing experiences and services related to products that include care, update/upgrade, repair, and recycling. The central idea is that by designing experiences and services for products, value that is based on human wellbeing needs can be added to them. We aim to shape new cultures of consumption that will meet the demands of the market for greater sustainability, whilst giving consumers greater agency to respect their environment - becoming custodians rather than consumers. This requires a new relationship between consumers and their products. We believe that experiences and services for products must be constituents of this relationship, hence the challenge is to translate our understanding of needs related to human wellbeing into the design of product-experience-service offerings. We will innovate CX Digital Tools to support experiences and services for physical apparel products that are related to care, repair and update/upgrade in order to keep apparel in use for as long as possible. We will define a set of scenarios and associated technologies for new cultures of CE, by gaining understanding of how social and digital actors (the consumer-public, charity shops, repair initiatives, clothes swapping initiatives, apparel brands, retailers, and digital-electronics hacker communities) come together to enact a CE. We will innovate new sensing and perceptual technologies based on novel computer vision and machine learning architecture to be used by consumers to understand materials and materials degradation, to make decisions of material reparation and to express their perceptions around aged, repaired, updated/upgraded products. We will evaluate user interactions and perceptions derived from scenarios, with a methodological contribution to the evaluation that combines our HCI, social sciences, design and phenomenological approaches. The CX Digital Tools is designed and specified using our Circular Experience Model we have conceptualised, which has four categories: 1) Pre-Ownership; 2) During Ownership; 3) Giving up Ownership; 4) Post Ownership. We will use these four categories to design a set of experiences and services for apparel products that are focused on the human perceptual experience of materials - specifically, materials from waste and recycled materials, ageing and wear, repair, and update/upgrade. We will adopt a Citizen Science approach in order to design and test experiences and services with consumers and stakeholders. Through this approach we will ensure that we are reducing the need to develop new technology products, as we will seek to work with digital technologies that consumers already possess, which forms part of our approach to mitigate environmental impacts both in our research programme as in the outcomes of it. This 30 month project will be led by the Materials Science Research Centre at the Royal College of Art in partnership with UCL - the University College London Interaction Centre, Computer Science Department, and the Knowledge Lab.

Textiles for clothing are a major user of plastics, in which the plastic component is frequently combined with natural fibres such as cotton and wool. Globally, 438 million tonnes of plastic were produced in 2017, of which 62 M tonnes were used in the textile industry (compared with 158 M tonnes used in plastic packaging). Plastics in textile waste are thus a major, but hidden, contributor to the plastic waste issue. In the UK, 2.5 M tonnes of plastic packaging and >1 M tonnes of textile waste are generated annually. While plastic packaging has attracted attention and concern worldwide for some time, textile waste has only become prominent recently, in part because separating the plastic from the natural fibres and other components makes recycling textile waste a challenging task. A 2016 UK survey showed that textile waste goes to landfills 55%, incineration 26% and recycling/reusing 16%, with <1% textile waste used to generate material to be used for producing new clothing. Apart from old clothes recycled or reused via charity organisations, the majority of the plastic used in the textile industry is not recycled, contributing to plastic pollution and depletion of raw materials. If the plastic component (mainly polyester) can be separated from cotton, dye and other components in the textile waste, it can be recycled into reclaimed fibres using the same method for recycling plastic bottles into textile products. Existing mechanical recycling technology can recycle textile waste composed of a single polymer, but is not able to treat complex textiles such as polycotton garments (a mixture of polyester and cotton). Chemical recycling methods break down the textile fibres into their building blocks and then synthesise new polymers and subsequently new fibres via appropriate spinning techniques. But chemical recycling is energy intensive and natural fibres, such as cotton (formed of cellulose) and wool (protein fibre), are degraded to a point that they cannot be used to generate new fibre, therefore losing their intrinsic value. Researchers at the University of Huddersfield have recently developed an enzyme-assisted textile waste valorisation process that breaks down cellulose into glucose for biofuel fermentations, allowing recycling of the remaining polyester. The proposed project will modify this enzymatic approach to only partially break down cellulose to enable its separation from the polyester in polycotton, such that both components can be recovered and re-spun into new textile fibres. The project will also apply ionic liquid extraction for the separation of cellulose from plastics, separately and in combination with enzyme processing. Ionic liquids can dissolve cellulose, but the high price of commonly used ionic liquids have limited their commercial application. Researchers at Imperial College London have pioneered the development of more sustainable and cost effective ionic liquid extraction processes using much cheaper ionic liquids. The ionoSolv process for sustainable cellulose production was selected by Scientific American as one of the Top Ten Emerging Technologies of 2019 and is currently being commercialised for the fractionation of waste biomass by Lixea Ltd. (www.lixea.co) at a £4 million bespoke pilot plant in Sweden. In this project, ionoSolv technology will be applied to recover both the natural cellulose fibres and the dyes from waste textiles, in forms suitable for reuse in new textile products. The recycled polyester and cellulose will be re-spun into fibre at the Technical Textile Research Centre at the University of Huddersfield. The regenerated fibre will then be used by the industrial partner to demonstrate its suitability for making new textile products. The economic, social and environmental impacts of the novel process will be assessed for its benefits to stakeholders throughout the value chain - recyclers, manufacturing industries, retailers, consumers and society as a whole.