Techstyle 2022 winners
14/11/2022
Among the five 2022 awards, two were given to textile-oriented concepts. Fibe, a project submitted by students at the Imperial College London, won the Grand Prize for textiles and apparel. It aims to extract fibres from potato harvest waste. The stems of potato plants are said to be poisonous and can neither be fed to livestock nor composted, leading to some 250 million tonnes of a fibrous material going to waste (pulverised or incinerated) the project team stated. The widespread availability of this raw material would make Fibe an easily scalable solution, it suggested. The “feasibility and automatability” of the fibre extraction process is said to have been demonstrated at lab scale and the fibre produced would be comparable to silk in denier, have a soft hand feel and may possess anti-microbial properties.
The Special Prize for textiles and apparel went to Redivivum Technology, presented by students at Instituto Marangoni London. It is a textile waste collection and sorting solution that would be offered as “Hardware-as-a-Service” or HaaS to fashion brands and retailers, municipalities or other organisations. Its ability to automatically sort textiles using Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIS) would help support the development of fibre-to-fibre recycling, the team said.
The winners will receive mentorship and support to develop their projects, they are offered a three-month residency at The Mills Fabrica in either Hong Kong or London along with access to industry partners and funding (of up to HKD 15,000 or USD 1,900). All in all, these prizes are said to be worth HKD 550,000 (or some USD 70,000).
The finalists for the 2022 award in textiles and apparel included a personalised, biodegradable self-healing 3D-printed footwear concept; an enzyme-based polyamide recycling process; a project seeking to tap algae for future fashion; and a method to develop a fibre having the properties of spider silk.
The judges for this edition were Anne-Gaëlle Lamort (Kering sustainability lead), Christiane Dolva (H&M Foundation), Craig Smith (Pangaia), Edwin Keh (HKRITA), Sonalie Figueiras (GreenQueen & Ekowarehouse), among others.
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