RESET: RESearch centers of Excellence in the Textile sector

The textile and clothing sector in Europe includes 173,000 companies with a turnover of €165 billion, employing 1.87 million people. The sector’s competitiveness is linked to innovation and technology development and more recently, sustainability and environmentally-friendly production. Production uses high levels of raw materials, water, energy and chemicals and often generates air, water and soil pollution through untreated eﬄuent and waste, which can have a big impact on the environment.

New, sustainable approaches are being developed and adopted by textile and clothing companies across the EU. Informing stakeholders and policy makers about these good practices would allow those solutions to be adopted in other regions. RESET is an Interreg Europe project which aims to change the way European Structural Fund policies and programmes are implemented in the partners’ regions.

Its key objective is to improve regional policies and promote a more sustainable approach to production in the sector. This includes the creation, management and enhancement of the Research and Development and Innovation infrastructures required to develop greener and more sustainable textile and clothing products and processes which will diﬀerent these regions from their competitors.

RESET addresses 6 key themes:

 Recycling in textile and waste disposal

 Water consumption and energy saving, sustainable company organisations

 New sustainable chemistry, including reduction of chemical substances

 Smart textiles and new ways of production

 Eco-creativity, natural ﬁbres, short value chains

 New materials and new applications

Each RESET partner will develop an Action Plan detailing how policy instruments are to be improved in each region, indicating the actions, timeframe, players, possible costs and funding sources required. They will be embedded into the participating regions’ National and Structural Fund Programmes with the aim of signiﬁcantly reducing the environmental impact of textile and clothing production across Europe whilst increasing the competitiveness of the sector.