On February 28th, a consortium meeting of MIDWOR-LIFE project was held in CETIM facilities in A Coruña, Spain, with the participation of all project partners. Additionally, the External Advisory Board of the project attended to this meeting as part of the project strategy to gather vital inputs for the later stage of the project and beyond. The members present were Mr. Mauro Scalia, Manager of Sustainable Businesses at EURATEX, Mr. Germán Garcia, Sustainability Manager at Inditex, and Dr. Giorgio Rovero, professor at Politecnico di Torino.

The meeting began with the presentations of the progress and outcomes obtained for each action during the last 6 months. Alongside the up-to-date results, each partner also presented their proposed action plan for the coming months. After each action presentation, a discussion was opened among all the participants to evaluate and propose guidelines for next steps.

Key advances during this semester are the results of the firsts industrial demonstration of DWOR performed in 4 textile companies: TF2000 (Italy), Inotex (Czech Republic), Hidrocolor (Spain) and E.CIMA (Spain). In the next weeks, the remaining two industrial demonstrations will take place in Biella Manifatture Tessili (Italy), and in Nanomembrane (Czech Republic).

The data obtained on those industrial tests will feed into several actions of the project in order to assess the technical feasibility of alternative DWOR products, the risk assessment to evaluate the exposure paths and the life cycle to assess the environmental and health impact. In addition, the results from all actions combined will be used to make policy recommendations and help defining the roadmap for the next 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 Czech Republic.

The presence of external observers allowed the participants to obtain a critical view of the work done and will help focusing the project next steps more successfully by emphasizing the needs of the textile industry which currently uses these type of finishing products.