Technological Centre

Press release of the 30th meeting of the LIFE MIDWOR project consortium

MIDWOR-LIFE is a project co-financed by the LIFE + program whose objective is to reduce the impact caused on the environment, human health and worker safety, by the current water and oil repellents (DWOR) used in the textile industry looking for alternatives , analyzing its environmental impact and technical functionalities.

On February 28, a meeting of the LIFE-MIDWOR project consortium took place at the CETIM facilities in A Coruña, Spain, with the participation of all the partners. In addition, external advisors to the meeting also attended as part of the project’s strategy to obtain vital entries for the remainder of the project and once the project is completed. In this case the assistants were Mr. Mauro Scalia, Head of Sustainable Development EURATEX, Mr. Germán Garcia, responsible for sustainability at Inditex, and Dr. Giorgio Rovero, professor at the Polytechnic of Turin.

The meeting began with presentations of the progress and results obtained for each action during the last 6 months. In addition to the updated results, each partner also presented their action plan for the following months. After the presentation of each action a discussion was opened among all the attendees to evaluate and propose guidelines to be used in the following steps.

The key advances during this semester are the results of the first industrial demonstration of DWOR executed in 4 textile companies: TF2000 (Italy), Inotex (Czech Republic), Hidrocolor (Spain) and E.CIMA (Spain). In the coming weeks the two remaining industrial demonstrations will take place, which will be held in Biella Manifatture Tessili (Italy), and Nanomembrane (Czech Republic).

The data obtained in these industrial tests will be included in several project actions in order to see the technical feasibility of the alternative DWOR products, the risk assessment for the exhibition and the life cycle that will evaluate the environmental and health impact. In addition, the results of the combination of all actions will be used to make policy recommendations and help define a roadmap for the coming years. Once the industrial results are available, they will be published on the MIDWOR website and several workshops will be organized in Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic.

The presence of external advisors to the meeting allowed the participants to obtain a critical vision of the work done and will help them to centre the following steps of the project in a more successful way emphasizing the needs of the textile industry that currently uses this type of finishing their products.