Aiming to improve efficiency and cut costs through sustainable innovation.
Digital Catapult, the London-based UK authority on advanced digital technology, has announced that four leading businesses have joined the Made Smarter Innovation Digital Supply Chain Hub programme to solve industrial challenges posed by their supply chains.
The participating companies have sponsored specific challenges with technology providers that, if solved, will yield significant benefits for the country’s textiles and hydrogen industries, with each technology provider receiving up to £100,000 in funding.
Software provider Looper will receive support from leading fashion retailer New Look to develop a tool that will help to better understand the life cycle of its garments. By aggregating performance measurements from product life cycle assessments (LCAs), the new solution will enable the retailer to more accurately gather data on how eco-friendly its products are throughout their lifecycle. In understanding each product’s environmental impact – from raw material extraction to end of life – New Look will be able to provide customers with more sustainable clothing options and meet growing demand from environmentally-minded consumers.
Transport management company Loadar will work to develop a new pricing engine to optimise truck fill and cut the carbon footprints of logistics providers, with support from Norfolk-based ShredStation, which specialises in safe and sustainable clothing disposal.
Technology startup MadeBy will look to develop a new solution that will track the flow of materials for different products across a textiles supply chain, sponsored by QSA Partners. The solutions developed on the programme will be deployed into the Circle-8 Textile Ecosystems testbed, which is one of Digital Catapult’s twenty testbeds located across the country.
The Circle-8 Textile Ecosystems testbed is currently creating and implementing two closely connected manufacturing facilities, with the first focusing on advanced textiles sorting and pre-processing (ATSP), and the second working to establish a reliable, high-volume and cost-effective supply of feedstock for manufacturing.