If electronic textiles (e-textiles) are to have a sustainable future and at scale, then a transition is needed to unlock innovative wearable e-textiles that fit a sustainable circular economy – adopting what has been termed as the 4R design concept: repair; recycle; replace; reduce.
E-textiles are worn close to and/or against the surface of the skin, with applications in healthcare, gaming, athletic training and environmental monitoring. Thanks to embedded electronic components, e-textiles can store and harvest energy, sense, display, actuate and compute.
Yet there are two major challenges to the future growth of e-textiles: firstly, high costs, therefore resulting in slower consumer adoption. Secondly, high environmental costs associated with mass production, in particular, microplastic water pollution. Fundamentally, we need new ways to prevent the scale-up of e-textiles from becoming the next electronic waste (e-waste) environmental fiasco.
This is according to a team of engineers and scientists from the UK, Canada, the USA and China, led by the University of Cambridge, who warn that the e-textile supply chain and its potential for scalable commercialisation could be “further complicated” by the associated global environmental burden, and the growing use of nanomaterials in e-textiles. They say that some of these nanomaterials can pose environmental challenges and could also have adverse effects on human health (e.g. skin irritation and/or absorption of loose nanoparticles into the skin).
Writing in the journal Nature Materials, the research team proposes the 4R e-textile design concept (repair; recycle; replace; reduce) alongside innovations in materials selection and biofabrication-inspired processing – a revolutionary approach that uses additive manufacturing processes to produce biomaterials, devices, cells and tissues. The aim is to reach sustainable growth and balance economic returns/scalable commercialisation with “environmental consciousness”, at a time when consumers are actively aligning their purchasing behaviours with sustainability goals.
"The road towards ‘green’, biohybrid and circular fabrication calls for the marriage of our 4R concepts with functional fibre production/digital additive manufacturing and biofabrication to produce highly customisable e-textile designs," Professor Professor Shery Huang, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge
HaoTian Harvey Shi; Yifei Pan; Lin Xu; Xueming Feng; Wenyu Wang; Prasad Potluri; Liangbing Hu; Tawfique Hasan; Yan Yan Shery Huang. ‘Sustainable electronic textiles towards scalable commercialization’. Nature Materials (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-023-01615-z
Read the full Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge article
Image credit: Dr Harvey Shi, first co-author