Sustainable Innovative Strategies at ITV
NITextile participated in the Sustainable Innovative Strategies event on STV, on the óma platform, hosted by Luís Cristino and Filipe Soutinho, which took place on November 23rd, in Famalicão. The session opened with Luís Cristino who introduced all the participants of the event.
Key Note Speaker Inês Costa from Deloitte pointed to sustainability as one of the risk factors for companies, both at an economic, environmental and social level, where she revealed studies carried out by Deloitte that showed the scarcity of raw materials and their cost as the main risk factors. He also indicated that SMEs are the group of companies most lacking in awareness of sustainability measures, where he showed his concern, given that together, they represent the most in terms of environmental impact. The risks listed with the greatest impact were the metaverse, circularity, sustainability and blockchain. However, the drivers of trends pointed out for ITV were sustainability, second life, total digitalization, the functional symbolism of intangible benefits and the transformation of products into financial assets with aging.
Another relevant point was regulatory trends, with co-creation of responsibility, where the entire value chain, traceability, recycling and technological investment must work as one. This is because the sustainability reporting system is coming, which will force the entire chain to report and take responsibility for its process. This reporting will force companies to collect and process information that will allow them to support strategic decisions, but also expose risks and reputation. On the other hand, it will be possible to compare and measure all organizations by the same rules.
Finally, he left some questions for reflection: “What are the biggest sustainability challenges in your organization?”, “What are the short-term priorities”?
In the second part of the event, Joana Campos (Fashion Makers Studio) moderated the round table, which included four participants from the ITV sector.
António Brás Costa from Citeve gave a brief summary of the work that Portugal is doing in the context of sustainability in the Textile and clothing sector, where he highlighted that sustainability is for EVERYONE, and that the beginning will have to be through water and energy reduction, as well as more local raw material solutions.
Ana Silva Tavares from RDD explains that the new generation of regenerated cellulose fibers, from waste, as is the case of Circulose, are fibers with good performance, demand and supply are reasonable, but that there are challenges that need to be overcome, such as the origin of the fibers that are mixed into the yarn with these fibers and the increase in investment in these pilot projects, which are usually start-ups with a lot of potential, but the time to reach the market and its scalability is a long journey and requires large investments.
João Valério from Recutex highlighted the weakness of textile waste collection in Portugal, being an area that needs a government strategy, otherwise we are losing a huge source of raw material for the industry.
Pedro Silva from TMG textiles explained that the incorporation of sustainable products or materials has moved from capsule products to the center of development collections, where price is still a topic of discussion but that new fibers bring performance and scalability that are increasingly valued for their differentiation.
This panel closed with a survey of topics for reflection for the industry of tomorrow, where collaboration between companies is increasingly important, the digitalization of the industry and the creation of multidisciplinary teams within the industry will be decisive in facing the challenges.