Senior technician Sean Taylor displays the new solution for mounting sensors onto smart clothing. Photo: RNZ
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Over the last three decades the rise of fast fashion, and the explosion of plastics in our clothes like polyester and nylon, has created sustainability and environmental issues.
Globally 92 million tonnes of textile waste is produced each year, and an estimated half a tonne of unwanted clothes is sent to landfills in New Zealand every five minutes. The fashion industry is a major contributor to carbon emissions, and each wash of petroleum-based textiles produces more microplastic pollution that gets into our waterways.
Enter the European UPWEARS project, which aims to use science and innovation to tackle these problems.
Future fashion
"We are expecting to have a totally new, sustainable and innovative supply chain for the textile industry," says Dr Yi Chen.
UPWEARS is a four-year, €7 million (NZ$13.7m) research project involving 14 partners from seven countries, one of which is New Zealand's Bioeconomy Science Institute. While the project is led by the French national research institute INRAE, Yi is the UPWEARS New Zealand lead, based on the Institute's campus in Rotorua (previously Scion).
It is a lofty goal. One that they have split into different sections to tackle; replacing plastic-based yarns with natural ones that will biodegrade, creating new textile processing technologies that are more energy efficient, designing smart sensing 'e-textiles' and figuring out if there's a way to recycle existing textile waste.
Photo: Bioeconomy Science Institute
The project is funded by Horizon Europe, the EU's key funding programme for research and innovation. New Zealand can bid for funding by applying with European partners and the New Zealand government pays back to Horizon Europe what is received in grants.
This international collaboration is key, says Yi. The Bioeconomy Science Institute has expertise in biomaterial development, and the campus has biodegradation facilities that will be vitally important for later in the project to test whether the clothing they create can break down. The European partners bring state-of-the-art research facilities like particle accelerators and large-scale additive manufacturing, as well as textile industry knowledge.
The project kicked off in November 2024 with a meeting in France and the next gathering will take place in Rotorua in 2027.
At that stage, they hope to have produced a prototype example of 'clothing of the future' - a smart cycling suit with built-in sensors capable of analysing your sweat or environmental conditions. All made from natural fibres that can be reused or biodegrade at the end of the clothing's life.
Dr Kate Parker at the Bioeconomy Science Institute's biodegradation facility. Photo: RNZ
Creating clever yarn for smart clothing
In one of the chemistry labs on campus Dr Robert Abbel holds up a clear plastic bag with two fibres inside. One is a pale-yellow colour. This is what their European partners send to him - samples of the natural-based yarns they have developed made from hemp and European flax.
The other is a dark black colour, a result of Robert's efforts to make this yarn able to conduct electricity.
To do this he makes use of a molecule called lignin which is naturally found in wood but is stripped out as waste in the paper-making industry. But Robert has found a way to put this waste to use.
"We process the lignins into nanoparticles and then give them a high temperature, so-called carbonisation, treatment. So they turn into carbon. That means they get conductive. And then we deposit them on the yarns in order to make the yarns conductive so that they can be woven into functional textiles."
Their collaborators will use these conductive yarns in their aim of creating smart textiles - sensors that are part of the clothing that can monitor different health or environmental markers, such as breathing and heart rate, or air pollutants.
But they will need something to mount these sensors on, and work is underway on that too in Rotorua.
Dr Robert Abbel has been working on how to make the natural fibre yarn conductive using the waste product lignin. Photo: RNZ
Putting paper-making skills to new use
Senior technologist Sean Taylor spends much of his time in one of the oldest labs on campus. Once it would have been used to investigate how best to make paper out of wood pulp. Now Sean is applying this knowledge to new research questions.
Cellulose, the main strengthening component of wood, is the most abundant polymer on Earth, and is the basis of papermaking. Now, Sean says, while demand for paper production seems to be waning, there's growing interest in using cellulose to replace plastic polymers wherever possible.
Sean has been combining cellulose from different sources (different tree species have different length cellulose fibres) with waste lignin to produce a paper-like material that's stiff, robust and water resistant. Perfect to mount a sensor on for this new smart clothing.
As well as this innovation around biomaterials, some of the Rotorua-based UPWEARS team are also investigating whether there are solutions for existing textile waste.
End of life
In a garage-like space at the back of the campus, Louise Le Gall flicks leavers and pushes a satisfyingly-large red button to switch the big yellow extrusion machine on.
As it hums to life, she explains that it uses a combination of heat and mechanical pressure exerted by two turning screws to melt and mix whatever is fed into it. Louise is currently researching whether she will be able to give used textiles a new lease of life using this machine.
Louise Le Gall is the materials engineer tasked with try to figure out how to recycle waste textiles into 3D printer filament. Photo: RNZ
The goal is to take different types of materials and use them to create 3D printing filament, but it is all about characterising what you are working with, she explains.
"You have to know how to play with the parameters to obtain the product you want at the end. So in the case of the UPWEARS project, we have some textile waste. You can have nylon, you can have polyester, you can also have cotton. And our goal is to find which parameter we're going to choose to mix all that together in the machine, without burning one material and melting the other."
If it works, they'll use this recycled textile filament to 3D print padding to be used in the sportswear. Which the team are hoping will be ready for a test run in Whakarewarewa Forest Park in Rotorua in 2027.
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