From April 2^nd to 4^th, the third edition of the iTechStyle Summit - International Conference on Textile and Clothing, organized by CITEVE, was held in Porto.

Several speakers from the industry and academy discussed on the latest trends, strategies, opportunities and challenges, in the areas of industry 4.0, digitization and dematerialization of textile and clothing prototypes, new advanced fibers and materials, new technical and smart structures, and sustainability and circular economy.

On 4^th April, within the Sustainability & Circular Economy session, Josep Casamada, Project Manager from AEI TÈXTILS, the technical textiles’ cluster of Catalonia, presented the conference Sustainability and circular economy: an opportunity to increase the competitiveness of the textile industry. 

He focused his presentation on an introduction to the cluster and presented two examples of circular economy applied by two of its members, ARPE and ANTEX. Lastly, he presented different projects the cluster is working on within this field like the European projects MIDWOR-LIFE and LIFE-FLAREX among others.

Josep Casamada during his presentation

In parallel with the conference, several meetings of the European network of experts in advanced textile materials, CONTEXT, led by the Cluster Manager of AEI TÈXTILS, Dr. Ariadna Detrell, were organized.

Several members of the network were present at the conference and at the meetings, which focused on discussing the common points related to digitization and sustainability in the different working groups of the network.

Ariadna Detrell and Josep Casamada (right) together with the leaders of the working groups 1: Textile for medicine and health (Yesim Oguz) and 4:Textiles for building & living (Enrico Venturini)

CONTEXT also organized a thematic workshop of Working Group 5: Textiles for sport and wearables. 30 experts from academics and from the industry participated. The session began with an introduction to CONTEXT by Ariadna Detrell. It was followed by a presentation of the scientific and technological bottlenecks in the field of sport and wearables, by Dr. Savvas Vassiliadis, from the Greek university West Attica. Next, Ana Ribeiro, Executive Director of the Portuguese Textile Cluster presented the objectives, thematic groups, trends and challenges of the cluster working group dedicated to the sports sector. The presentations were closed by a representative of a major retail company in the sector that presented his vision of the market trends and needs. The workshop ended with a working session with the participants, who were divided in four groups to discuss the possibilities to cope with the different challenges (technological, industrial or market) of textile materials in the sports sector.

Participants at the thematic workshop of the working group on textiles for sport and wearables