Upbeat
The comprehensive showcase of textile technology featured some 1,709 exhibitors, categorised and arranged hall-wise across 18 supply chain sectors and attracted over 111,000 visitors from 143 countries.
What was perhaps most surprising at ITMA 2023 – given the generally gloomy analyst forecasts for the immediate future of the textile industry – were the number of new sales being announced and the genuinely upbeat atmosphere.
Resiliency
Many exhibitors expressed their astonishment at the readiness of textile businesses to be investing at this precarious point in time, but big legislative changes are on the horizon and sometimes human optimism and resiliency just win out.
“This ITMA edition has been a great success, with the visitorship higher than the previous exhibition in 2019,” said Ernesto Maurer, president of show organiser Cematex. “At this ITMA, the transformation journey towards digitalisation and sustainability has taken a huge leap forward. It has been a mega gathering with the presence of stakeholders from the entire textile and garment making ecosystem. Cematex associations and their member companies, as well as all other exhibitors, are delighted with the results as the exhibition surpassed all our expectations.”
Recycling
A major theme at the exhibition was recycling, in the drive towards a more sustainable global textile industry.
The European Union’s Strategy for Textiles is calling for all textile products on the EU market to be durable, repairable and recyclable – and largely made of recycled fibres – by 2030. This is something textile manufacturers around the world are going to have to respond to and is already leading to the establishment of many important new supply chain partnerships.
Automated Sorting
As a leader in recycling technology following its acquisition of French specialist Laroche at the end of 2020 for example, Andritz had an extremely busy show and announced a partnership with French companies Pellenc ST and Synergies TLC to set up a new industrial scale business – Nouvelles Fibres Textiles – combining automated sorting and fibre recycling technology.
The new company will establish post consumer textile value chains from sorting to manufacturing by combining Pellenc ST’s automated sorting technologies with Andritz recycling equipment.
Andritz also announced the acquisition of Dan-Web Machinery, the Denmark headquartered supplier of technologies for the production of airlaid nonwovens at the show, as well as the installation of a new spunlace pilot line at its centre of competence in Montbonnot, France, to enable customers to conduct trials for producing nonwovens from recycled and/ or natural fibres.
Digital Infrastructure
The accurate and highly automated sorting of waste garments has been identified as a major bottleneck in accelerating the recycling of textiles, which made the debut of Spain’s Wastex at ITMA 2023 timely – the new company has been formed to provide the physical and digital infrastructure for accurate garment sorting in textile recycling centres worldwide.
A joint venture between two Barcelona based companies, Coleo, a textile manufacturing company specialising in recycled fibres, and Picvisa, a technology firm supplying sorting machines, Wastex has proven know-how throughout the value chain – from collecting and sorting textile waste to creating garments for the most exacting consumers and brands – and focuses on streamlining textile waste sorting for reuse, recycling and upcycling.
This is enabled by the Ecosort Textil system, which uses a combination of NIR (near-infrared) and RGB cameras, as well as AI technology, to efficiently sort textiles – with up to 24 separate outputs – and provide high-quality recycled yarn feedstock for the textile manufacturing industry.
Wastex offers various automated sorting solutions for different stages in the textile recycling process, such as removing contaminants, separating reusable textiles, categorising materials by composition and colour, and preparing materials for recycling.
Central to its strategy is the Coleo Network – a collaborative platform that enables partners to access guaranteed sales of recycled materials.
Polyester From Apparel Waste
A Shimano-branded cycling shirt was meanwhile displayed at the stand of Pure Loop, a subsidiary of Austria’s Erema Group – demonstrating the full feasibility of closed loop polyester garment production.
The Shimano shirt is the result of a project initiated by Italian fibre leader RadiciGroup and sportswear manufacturer Sportstex, and as a company specialising in fibre recovery machinery, Pure Loop’s involvement saw the three companies carrying out a range of tests to achieve a recycled textile product with advanced technical features.
An initial result was obtained using a mixed recovery technique – the dosing of variable percentages of granules from recycled bottles together with polyester granules from recycled fabrics.
100 Per Cent Textile Waste
The mixed recovery process was gradually fine-tuned to produce a yarn that is 100 per cent derived from recovered textile waste, from which the Shimano cycling shirt was produced, with exactly the same performance properties as the shirt made from virgin polyester.
Erdotex – a company specialised in the sorting of used garments, with plants in the Netherlands and Belgium – is now supporting the project, and using specific procedures, will make it possible to feed the circular recycling process that has been developed, with a view to future industrial-scale production.
Spinning
The major developers of cotton spinning technology are also responding to the recycling challenge, and during the show Switzerland’s Rieter unveiled a high quality Ne 30 compact yarn that contains an impressive 40 per cent recycled post-industrial fabric waste. Typically, a recycled fibre content of only 20 per cent is achievable when producing recycled ring yarn.
This has been achieved in a partnership with Spain’s fibre recycling specialist Recover and Portuguese spinner and textile manufacturer Polopiqua.
The ring spinning process used for the development incorporates a Rieter comber and COMPACTdrum compacting device. Recover’s recycled cotton fibres were blended with virgin cotton at a 50/50 ratio with undesirable short fibres and neps effectively removed during combing, resulting in a significant enhancement in yarn quality and improved running performance of the ring spinning machine. Furthermore, the fibres removed by the comber are perfectly suitable for processing on Rieter rotor spinning machines. With these advantages in place, the process aims to be GRS (Global Recycling Standard) certified.
Circulose
Swiss spinning technology leader, Saurer, announced its own partnership with Inovafil of Portugal and Renewcell, the Swedish company behind Circulose, the new fibre that can be made from 100 per cent textile waste.
Circulose is a renewable dissolving pulp made from cotton-rich textile waste that can be turned into new viscose fibres and filaments to allow for a circular textile production system to be established.
The rapid scaling up to a 60,000 ton annual capacity of this new fibre has been made possible by technology in part adapted from the established paper making process, in partnership with SCA, with whom Renewcell shares the site of its new plant in Sweden. Over 80 per cent of the capacity of the plant has already been reserved by customers, following a series of high-profile capsule collections from brands.
At ITMA 2023, Saurer demonstrated Circulose being spun on all three of its industry-leading spinning systems – rotor, ring and air – and introduced its rX Recycling Xtreme technology concept.
“Today only between 30-35 per cent of textiles are collected separately, but by 2030 the aim in Europe is that up to 80 per cent will be recycled in some way and that the share of fibre-to-fibre recycling will grow to 18-26 per cent from just 1 per cent,” the company’s chief operating officer Marcus Rennekamp explained. “A high degree of contamination, reduced production speeds and a lot of personnel intervention are all common consequences of using recycled short-staple fibres in a rotor spinning mill. Extreme recycling is the new challenge for yarn producers, with ultra-short fibres bringing conventional spinning machines to their limits.”
RCO100
Santis Textiles, a Swiss-owned, Singapore-headquartered company, announced a partnership with Turkey’s Temsan for the commercial production of its RCO100 technology, with which it is already recycling around 100,000 tons of cotton annually.
“RCO100 technology works by using pre-consumer industrial waste and post-consumer cotton garment waste to produce 100 per cent recycled cotton yarns without the use of chemical processes,” explained managing director Annabelle Hutter. “Since its conception in 2016, RCO100 technology has been implemented by global brands to produce 100 per cent recycled cotton wovens, nonwovens and knits, providing more circular design solutions for the modern designer.”
Bottleneck
Big changes are also afoot in the area of dyeing and finishing –at the moment an energy-intensive bottleneck in the textile manufacturing chain.
There are currently an estimated 90,000 jet dyeing machines in operation worldwide and between 60-70 per cent of them are outdated to a factor of two-to three in terms of the savings in energy, water and dyes and finishes that can be made – even with the latest conventional systems. That productivity gap is considerably higher when considering the latest highly-digitised and precise systems for these processes that have been introduced to the market by a number of companies.
Dyecoo
Dyecoo, the Netherlands-based developer of water and chemicals-free supercritical CO2 polyester dyeing has been on a 13-year journey to fully prove the viability of such a disruptive technology.
Now, however, it has received solid commitments from major brands that will see its wide adoption.
“Many brands are facing the end of their sustainability roadmaps in the next five to-ten years, which is allowing suppliers to get commitments from them for volumes and build their own business cases for investing in new sustainable technologies,” said the company’s commercial director for Asia, Kaspar Nossent.
Among brands which have now committed to take-off agreements from Dyecoo installations are Adidas, Bon-Prix, Brooks, Colordry, Dryedye, Gap, Decathlon, Fjall-Raven, Inditex, Mizuno, Odlo, PVH and Target.
Benchmark Site
Dyecoo, which is headquartered in Weesp, The Netherlands, first introduced its prototype Dyeox system in Thailand in 2010 and ten years later opened a 100 per cent CO2 plant in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, with a capacity of ten tons a day, as the model factory for proving the Dyecoo Dyeox system. It is now the benchmark site for Adidas, Decathlon and Bon Prix/Otto Group.
The annual savings achievable from a single Dyeox4 machine have been proven to amount to 33.6 million litres of water and 168 tons of chemicals, as well as energy savings, compared to a traditional water based bath dyeing system.
Dyecoo’s process dissolves pure dyes naturally without auxiliaries and the same quality can be achieved with the process anywhere in the world with 100 per cent batch to batch consistency. It can also colour both yarns and fabrics without any changes to the machine.
A Dyeox4 machine, such as the machines in place at Cleandye, can now treat 3-3.5 tons of fabric or yarn per day, based on a maximum width of two metres and 160 kilos per batch and an average of 20-22 batches treated per day.
In partnership with Portugal’s Borgstena, Circotex, a new sustainable dyeing and finishing company will now establish the first DyeCoo installation in the Netherlands and Europe for the production of automotive textiles.
Non-Contact Spray Dyeing
Baldwin, meanwhile, reported a number of new sales of its TexCoat G4, a non-contact spray technology for textile finishing and remoistening, engineered and manufactured in Sweden.
This machine not only reduces water, chemicals and energy consumption, but also provides the flexibility to adapt to a customer’s requirements in terms of single and double-sided finishing applications.
It is designed to allow a controlled and optimal coverage of the exact amount of finish chemistry for reaching specific characteristics of the fabric through a combination of precision valve technology coupled with optimised software algorithms to ensure accurate and even finishing coverage with virtually no waste.
TexCoat G4 can reduce water consumption by as much as 50 per cent compared to traditional padding application processes. Productivity is also increased by 50 per cent because of the lower wet pick up which allows for higher line speeds. Putting it simply, replacing every 2-3 padders with a TexCoat G4 is equal to adding the productivity of an additional finishing line at a fraction of the cost, with no additional floor space and no added labour.
Dyemax
Similar impressive savings can also now be made in textile dyeing with Imogo’s Dye Max spray dyeing technology.
It can slash the use of fresh water, wastewater, energy and chemicals by as much as 90 per cent compared to conventional jet dyeing systems as a result of an extremely low liquor ratio of 0.6-0.8 litres per kilo of fabric. At the same time, considerably fewer auxiliary chemicals are required to start with.
The application unit of the Dye-Max consists of a closed chamber containing a series of high speed digitally controlled valves with precision nozzles for accurate and consistent coverage.
Fast changeovers with virtually no waste together with a high production speed enable a high productivity and unmatched flexibility.
At ITMA 2023 the proven Mini-Max laboratory unit – used alongside Dye Max installations for pre-determining application volumes and colour matching for “right first-time dyeing” –was displayed to demonstrate the principles of Imogo’s technology.
Hydrogen
Established German manufacturer of dyeing and finishing machines Monforts introduced the concept of using green hydrogen as a new energy source for these processes. This was the subject of two very well-attended seminars held at the company’s stand during the show.
Monforts is currently leading a consortium of industrial partners and universities in the three-year WasserSTOFF project, launched in November 2022 to explore all aspects of fast-rising new industrial energy option. The target of the government-funded project is to establish to what extent hydrogen can be used in the future as an alternative heating source for textile finishing processes. This will first involve tests on laboratory equipment together with associated partners and the results will then be transferred to a stenter frame at the Monforts Advanced Technology Centre (ATC) in Germany.
“Everybody knows that textile finishing is an energy intensive process and to make it more efficient, we already offer several solutions, but as a technology leader we are also rising to the challenge of exploring alternative heating options to be ready for the future,” said Monforts marketing manager Nicole Croonenbroek.” Green hydrogen’s potential as a clean fuel source is tremendous, but there is much we need to explore when considering its use in the textile finishing processes carried out globally on our stenter dryers and other machines.”
Analogue-To-Digital
Much harder to illustrate, but present everywhere at ITMA 2023, were new developments in software, driving the digitalisation, automation and global connectivity of the textile industry.
This is particularly the case in the fast-rising digital printing sector, which is now enabling hundreds of new small to-medium companies (SMEs) to rapidly establish fully connected, produce-on demand digital platforms that are turning into a serious template for trading and a valid alternative to ‘fast fashion’ and all the waste it entails.
As one example of the progress being made in this field, Mimaki Europe launched the new Tiger600-1800TS, its most productive sublimation transfer printer to date, with a maximum printing speed of 550 square metres per hour.
A highly successful show was also reported by India’s leader in digital textile printing technology ColorJet.
This and other high-speed inkjet printers are designed to accelerate the analogue-to-digital transformation of the textile printing industry and all of the major companies making these machines recorded major sales at this year’s ITMA.
Patterned Fabrics Inspection
In a more immediate example of advanced data in action, the UK’s Shelton Vision has developed a unique new fabric inspection technique for accurately detecting defects on patterned fabrics during high-speed production.
“What our new system basically does is make the ‘good’ pattern on the patterned fabric invisible to the detection software,” explained Shelton Vision CEO Mark Shelton. “Building on our leading vision system for plain textiles, we have developed template-matching techniques for the resolution of complex pattern deformations in order for the system to pick up defects in the pattern, as well as underlying defects.
“The challenge is that fabrics are not rigid and can be creased or stretched and are also subject to local distortion. As a result, inspection without the technique we have developed, would lead to thousands of false positives. Our pattern inspection software techniques ensure a clean image, allowing the detection of faults on fabrics running at speeds of up to a hundred metres a minute.”
Weaving, Knitting And Nonwovens
Purely incremental improvements to the mechanical performance of weaving, knitting and nonwovens production machines are only to be expected, given their long history – yet the halls dedicated to these technologies were still by far the busiest in Milan this year. Demonstrations of the latest technologies attracted huge crowds throughout the show.
Only occasionally, do game changing technologies come along, and Whole Garment seamless knitting pioneered by Japan’s Shima Seiki was undoubtedly one of them.
That was 20 years ago now, but digital automation continues to offer new possibilities for advanced fabrics produced with the technology.
In Milan, Shima Seiki demonstrated no less than nine flat knitting machines in its new R-Series range, including shaping and glove-knitting machines, with many new features.
More than 300 sophisticated fabric samples were also showcased at the company’s stand, ranging from fashion, sports, shoes, bags and accessories to medical, safety, automotive and wearables.
In addition, the company’s SDS ONE Apex series graphic design system has been upgraded with significant improvements for knit programming, 3D functionality and speed and ease of use, making significant improvements in realistic virtual sampling possible, supported by full digital solutions and integrated web services.
Alterknit
Taiwan’s Pailung, a leading manufacturer of circular knitting machines meanwhile introduced AlterKnit, its latest fabric technology.
AlterKnit enables textile designers and manufacturers to produce luxurious fabrics with intricate patterns knitted into their structure while eliminating any need for fabric printing or dyeing,” explained chairman and CEO James CC Wang. “The upgraded version of inverse plating enables alternate yarns of different colour or composition to be knitted together within the same row.”
The technology yields crisp patterns with sharp borders and is a noticeable step up from standard inverse plating. It can capture the intricate details of a sports team emblem, for example, including text and logos. It is also reversible, producing two inverted versions of the same design in up to four colours on either side.
When designing for sportswear, different types of yarn can be combined to create functional fabrics with enhanced features, such as moisture-wicking, breathability, elasticity etc.
Fabric Structure
Unlike traditional printing, the designs produced on AlterKnit fabrics are knitted into the fabric’s structure, preventing any chemicals used during production from rubbing off or leaking into the surrounding environment.
The AlterKnit process can also reduce waste during production. In certain techniques like intarsia, yarns of different colours are knitted together, causing strands of loose yarn – yarn floats – to run along the back of the fabric. Other methods include splicing which involves cutting pieces of fabric in different colours and stitching them together, creating waste that is hard to recycle or repurpose.
With AlterKnit and the inverse plating technique, both the front and back of the fabric display patterns mirror each other, which means there are no yarn floats to trim away.
Up To 25,600 Positions
Swiss-headquartered Staubli is a long established leader in weaving technologies, with a portfolio spanning cam motions, dobbies and jacquards and drawing-in, leasing and warp-tying machines.
Its latest developments draw on the company’s wide experience in robotics and digitalisation, which global head of marketing Fritz Legler explained are intertwined with process efficiency.
“The better you control the process the more sustainable you are,” he said. “We are constantly developing new and improved high-performance solutions for processing fabrics for fashion, home fabrics, carpeting, automotive, protection and medical applications, as well as highly complex technical textiles for future applications. Our technologies are based on more than 2,200 granted or pending patents and are already used on approaching 70,000 weaving machines worldwide.”
An example of advanced digitalisation in action is to be found in the company’s PRO series of jacquard machines, which were launched at the end of 2022 for enhanced energy efficiency in the production of flat, terry, or one-piece woven fabrics.
They are available in formats ranging from 4,608 to 25,600 hooks – with each individual position controlled by the company’s latest Noemi electronics architecture, enabling perfectly synchronised hook lifting during high speed weaving for each single yarn.
This was digitalisation very much in action at ITMA 2023 in Milan.
One Million Needles
The new MicroPunch needlepunching system for nonwovens also attracted huge interest at Dilo’s stand in Milan.
It has been developed as a low-energy alternative to the hydroentangling process, largely for the production of wipes substrates and medical nonwovens, with weights below 100 gsm.
The company’s CEO Johann-Philipp Dilo explained that hydroentanglement – or spunlacing – is an extremely energy intensive process. “The process is based on high pressure jets which have to be formed continuously and all of that kinetic energy is completely lost,” he said. “In addition, there is continuous water consumption and losses, as well as fibre waste generation.”
Dilo’s Hyperpunch and Cyclopunch machines already operate at speeds of up to 150 metres per minute and stroke frequencies of 3,000 metres per minute.
Continuous waterjets, however, create webs with good abrasion resistance and density, and to achieve the same with needling requires needle densities of between 800-900 per square centimetre.
This, incredibly, is what MicroPunch can do.
A significant increase in that needle density has now been achieved to up to 45,000 needles per metre of board – making full lines with over one million needles conceivable.
Composites
Beyond the apparel sector, textiles are also employed in many technical applications, such as braided composite reinforcements. Here they are enabling the lightweighting of trains and boats and planes and much more, and millions of tons of CO2 emissions are being eliminated as a consequence.
A leader in braiding technology is Germany’s Herzog.
“Our braiding technologies are widely employed in the creation of near-net shape carbon fibre composite preforms – 3D textile structures as close to the shape of the final finished component as possible,” explained Herzog’s CEO Dennis Behnken. “In addition to composite preforms, two other key growth areas for braided textiles are ropes and medical products.”
The ability to replace steel with high strength fibres such as aramids, Dyneema and Vectran has resulted in ropes that have 75 per cent less weight with all of the advantages that brings in terms of towing, mooring, anchoring and lifting and lowering. In addition, ropes made from these fibres have ten times the working life of steel equivalents.
In medical products such as sutures, artificial ligaments and stents, braided fabrics are increasingly the preferred choice for their flexibility in terms of the customised shapes and patterns that can be achieved and the specialised fibres that can be accommodated.
These are incredibly sophisticated textile-based products, and there were many more such innovations shown at the exhibition in Milan.
Hanover 2027
The four key themes of ITMA 2023 were:
• Advanced materials
• Automation and the digital future
• Innovative technologies-and perhaps most importantly,
• Sustainability and circularity.
The exhibition certainly lived up to its goal of successfully showcasing the development of these themes, and this article represents only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what was going on, but where will you be in 2027?
The world could be a very different place by then and the global textile industry will certainly have made further gains – smarter and more sustainable for sure.
And ITMA will certainly be back – with Singapore scheduled for an additional exhibition in 2025, and Hanover in Germany its location in four years’ time.
ITMA 2023 was all about making connections for solving the problems the textile industry – and the wider world – currently faces, and we are only just at the start of what is possible.
It is an ongoing and highly-connected story. Until the next chapter.
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