Our
Mission

Our mission is to catalyse and accelerate the growth of smart textiles by cultivating cross-industry collaboration and supporting development of voluntary, consensual standards. This will ensure interoperability of electronics and textile components within the structured stack and mature the smart textile supply chain.

Sustainable e-textiles

Recent global focus on tackling the impacts of textile production, textile and electronic waste led to instigation of a wide variety of initiatives to facilitate behavioural changes in consumption and circular innovations to promote reuse and recycling.

Integration of electronic circuitry, sensors and batteries for innovative functionality in e-textiles increase environmental and manufacturing costs that are best mitigated via a modular approach.

By working for development of interoperable plug and play components and use of sustainable materials, STA fosters a modular approach that can facilitate replacement of defect components and disposal/recycling of electronic components via modification of existing e-waste schemes.
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Industry Standardization

Many industries, including electronics and textiles, have faced similar challenges, but successfully overcame them through formation of independent standards bodies and certification programmes.

Standards organizations shifted the needle on these industries; giving consumers the confidence they needed to buy these products and resulted in the strong and healthy growth of these industries.

This is exactly what is needed for smart textiles companies to grow. And precisely why we founded Smart Textile Alliance. Our vision is to make electronics soft and textiles smart to accelerate the cross-industry growth.

Our aim is therefore to develop industry standards based on leading smart textile technologies to support responsible and sustainable product development, activities that are align with the roadmap for the Smart textile Stack.

The Smart Textile Stack

The Smart Textile Stack is a framework to group components that are important to standardize.

  • Layer 1: Fibres (yarns) and Fabrics, including breathable films, non-wovens and other soft and flexible materials that form the circuits. A standard for a rigid connection point will enable common interconnection to flexible or fibre-based substrates.
  • Layer 2: Electronic connectors suitable for cloth. No existing connectors match textile properties and there is a need for a connector, with a similar form factor as the fasteners we know from trousers, bras, jackets etc, that can be attached to textiles.
  • Layer 3: A processing and communication platform that can execute software and make the data available to cloud services.
  • Layer 4: Handling and care of the garment. There are currently no labelling standards for washing smart textiles and no systems available for recycling these types of garments.

With this layered approach and a full implementation of supportive industry standards, developers of smart textiles should only care about sensor development, software applications and design of the smart textile product.

Opportunities

STA works to promote consensual industry standards for smart textile components to ensure their interoperability. We do so through collaborative R&D efforts, and by taking part in funded programmes.

We have extensive experience of putting together successful proposals and projects, so if you have a project idea that might be relevant for other companies in the smart textile supply chain too, you are welcome to get in touch with us to hear what opportunities might be available.