Trash-2-Cash was an EU funded research project which aimed to create new regenerated fibres from post-consumer waste. It was also pioneering a whole new way of developing materials.

One resource that’s becoming more abundant is waste. The idea of recycling textile waste has been popular for decades, but current mechanical methods give poor quality fabrics suitable only for industrial applications like insulation, and upcycling of pre-consumer textile waste into products is impossible to scale.

Trash-2-Cash (T2C) proposed a new model where paper and textile waste is recycled chemically – resulting in fabrics that are the same quality as new materials, to make products that are industrially replicable and infinitely recyclable.

Designers, design researchers, scientists, raw material suppliers and product manufacturers from across Europe made up a cross-disciplinary consortium representing the whole product supply chain. Here you can see the final products they created.