STELEC, short for Sustainable Textile ELECtronics, is an interdisciplinary research project funded by the European Innovation Council (EIC) under the Pathfinder programmes in the responsible electronics topic seeking cutting-edge innovation with an end goal at TRL 2-3. The project is a multinational collaboration of research institutes, universities and companies across Europe. It aims at developing next generation textile-based electronics in applications from sensing, processing to AI, with a commitment to full lifecycle sustainability.

CONTEXT AND OVERALL OBJECTIVES

E-textiles are rapidly emerging as an important area of electronic circuits applications. The European Apparel and Textile Confederation (Euratex) expects that the EU market for e-textiles and textile wearables reaches €1.5 billion in 2025 and will be a significant factor for an important European industry sector. It is also a facilitator for many socially important applications such as personalized health, elderly care, and smart agriculture. Unfortunately, the environmental impact and sustainability of e-textiles remain very problematic.

With e-textiles, electronic circuits are entering a new application domain increasing the number of devices that need to be produced and recycled. The vision behind e-textiles as part of Internet of Things is that intelligence (electronic components) will diffuse into more and more everyday objects, eventually leading to electronics being virtually everywhere in the environment, so that we are looking at a potentially huge environmental impact. E-textiles are particularly difficult in terms of recycling and re-use. This is because in general they involve electronic components being deeply embedded in textile substrates. Before recycling/reuse the two need to be separated which is a non-trivial task that disrupts established recycling/re-use chains. Furthermore, the focus of research and development so far has been on overcoming the challenges involved in producing cost effective and robust conductive textile structures with little regard for environmental impact and sustainability.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101162257.