Thread attended a consultation workshop for the UK textile community exploring textile R & D priorities for 2017-2020 organised by the Knowledge Transfer Network.
One of the main themes was development of textiles that can integrate with data gathering equipment for monitoring purposes eg medical.
Another strong theme was creating textiles that can be recycled easily without decreasing the value of the final textile. Increasing use of laminates in textiles (where several layers with different properties are combined to create a technical textile) can make this more difficult.
Website link: Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN)