Trash-2-Cash is an EU funded research project aiming to create new regenerated fibres from pre-consumer and post-consumer waste. It’s also pioneering a whole new way of developing materials.
One resource that’s becoming more abundant is waste. The idea of recycling textile waste has been popular for decades, but current mechanical methods give poor quality fabrics suitable only for industrial applications like insulation, and upcycling of pre-consumer textile waste into products is impossible to scale.
Trash-2-Cash (T2C) proposes a new model where paper and textile waste is recycled chemically - resulting in fabrics that are the same quality as new materials, to make products that are industrially replicable and infinitely recyclable.
Designers, design researchers, scientists, raw material suppliers and product manufacturers from across Europe make up a cross-disciplinary consortium representing the whole product supply chain. Eighteen partners, from ten countries, are working together to address the challenge of designing high quality industrial materials from waste.
This is a three-and-a-half-year project.