Sustainable Textile Electronics

Introduction

E-textile is a rapidly developing segment of electronics with an estimated growth from 2.3 billion USD in 2021 to 6.6 billion in 2026. They facilitate many socially important applications such as personalized health, elderly care, smart agriculture, and production.

Environmental Challenges

Unfortunately, today, e-textiles are highly problematic in terms of environmental impact. Problems range from:

• Toxic materials used for production
• Energy and water requirements
• Difficulty in end-of-life processing systems that combine traditional electronics and textile components

Project Aim

The aim of this project is to develop circuit technologies for e-textiles that:

1. Minimize environmental impact
2. Are compatible with the life-cycle of “normal” textiles to facilitate easy re-use in the spirit of circular economy
3. Can be produced (and recycled) in an energy-efficient way

Key Breakthrough Areas

The main breakthroughs with respect to the current state of technology will be in three areas:

1. A combination of digital inkjet, 3D printing, and atmospheric plasma to produce sustainable textile electronics building blocks from environmentally friendly materials (e.g., conducting polymers such as PEDOT:PSS and carbon-based polymer nanocomposites).

2. Going beyond embedding electronics in textile structures on substrate and layer levels, as is state of the art today, and using fibrous materials (enriched with electronic properties as stipulated above) to create electronic components such as transistors, capacitors, etc., and combine them into more complex circuits.

3. A comprehensive, lifecycle-oriented model of the environmental impact of such e-textile technologies and their applications.

Conclusion

Overall, STELECT will create the foundations for a new paradigm for e-textiles development that is not just environmentally friendly and sustainable but also fundamentally changes the way e-textiles and wearable systems are designed and built, facilitating whole new application domains and associated markets.