Susanne Eriksson

Wargön Innovation – R&D Hub for sustainable and circular textiles and biomaterials

Wargön Innovation is part of Innovatum Science Park which is specialized in industrial technology.
There are several science parks in Sweden, with different focuses, and their role are to push development and innovation and act as a link between business, research, academy and the public sector.

As a R&D Hub we run innovation projects with parallel business- and technology development with focus on supporting small- and medium-sized enterprises, but in cooperation with more large scale businesses. And as mentioned our main focus is textile and biomaterials.

We are about 15 employees and run about 15 projects in parallel.

And in our test/demo facility we have an equipment for development of methods for large-scale textile sorting and valuation.  

In the textile sorting equipment we have continuous sorting but in small scale with the purpose of testing of new methods.

We have the possibility to sort both manually, automatically, with NIR and we are also testing AI. This testbed is unique for the northern part of Europe.

We sort/valuate with broad focus, of course for reuse, remake and recycling but also for various innovation projects with other focuses. It could be for

• • new materials, such as a composite of jeans looking like wood
  • new techniques, where 3D printing is used to make shoes out of textile waste
  • new business models, such as take-back or rental