The global increase in bio-waste generation due to rapid population growth, industrialization, and urbanization presents both environmental challenges and opportunities. Valorising bio-waste into advanced technical textiles offers a sustainable solution by reducing environmental burden while addressing the demand for high-performance materials. This issue of Textile Progress explores the prospects for various bio-waste sources including agricultural residues, food industry by-products, livestock waste, and marine biomass to be transformed into functional fibres, biopolymers, nanomaterials and coatings. Such bio-waste-derived materials have the potential to exhibit desirable characteristics such as biodegradability, thermal insulation, antimicrobial activity, and mechanical strength, making them suitable for diverse textile applications. Innovative fibre extraction methods and valorisation techniques are highlighted, including mechanical, chemical, and enzymatic treatments, and nanomaterial synthesis. The environmental and economic impacts of bio-waste-management strategies are also examined, emphasizing the potential of circular economy practices. Despite recent advances, challenges such as scalability, material consistency, and processing limitations remain. This issue of Textile Progress aims to provide a comprehensive overview of bio-waste applications in technical textiles, supporting the development of sustainable materials that minimize dependence on petroleum-based products and contribute to eco-friendly industrial practices.

Auxetic textiles are intriguing materials with unusual capabilities. These materials exhibit a negative Poisson’s ratio with extraordinary performance in toughness, resilience, shear resistance, and acoustic properties mainly due to their special structure and associated deformation mechanics. Auxetic materials can also have applications around energy absorption and can effectively be used for vibration damping and shock absorbency. The exceptional behaviour of auxetic textiles can be obtained by utilising specific fibrous materials and introducing auxetic geometry and structures differently during weaving, knitting, and nonwoven manufacturing. This issue of Textile Progress highlights the fundamental aspects of various auxetic structures and their properties in general and a detailed analysis of auxetic textile structures and composites, their manufacturing processes, modelling, characterisation, and applications. These materials can potentially revolutionise their applications in sports, automotive, construction industry, biomedical engineering, aerospace, marine, and defence personal protective equipment. Fundamental understanding of auxetic geometry, followed by developing and analysing these geometries by analytical and computational modelling, translating the geometry into appropriate textile structures for actual fabric production, characterisation of auxetic fabrics and their composites, and finally, some innovative applications in technical textiles are some of the fascinating issues addressed in this review.

Leather, a popular material in a wide array of industries, is traditionally sourced from animal hides. The scale of production has increased over time, leading to ever-greater concerns about the environmental, ethical and health impacts of leather manufacture. The substantial resources required, plus the pollution and waste generated, pose serious doubts over the sustainability of existing production systems and their ability to meet the increasing demand for leather-like materials. To address these issues, alternatives to leather have been developed. Up to now though, these materials have been unable to perform as well as genuine leather, either mechanically, aesthetically or texturally. Some of the polymer-based alternatives may even be more harmful to the environment than leather itself. The need for a more-suitable leather substitute has coincided with the emergence of cellular agriculture technologies. In the future, it is hoped that leather-like materials may be engineered from collagen created by cellular agriculture, instead of relying upon animal slaughter. Such a material could offer great design, sustainability, environmental and ethical benefits over real leather. Whilst there is significant potential, more investment in research and development is needed before the technology can be considered sufficiently well developed. So far, tissue-engineering techniques applied from clinical fields have proven too costly and inefficient for scaling up, but work has already commenced to identify sources of collagen and cell growth media that are less animal-dependent and not so expensive. Even so, more-efficient methods of controlling the collagen network structure still need to be created. The new round of research is therefore expected to focus upon increasing cell-culture efficiency using, for example, specialised bioreactors.

Ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) has the potential to make a significant contribution to the efforts currently being made to help to protect the environment by reducing carbon emissions through the substitution of heavy conventional materials with lightweight polymeric materials. Used on its own, UHMWPE also offers complete recyclability with thermoplastic matrices. UHMWPE fibre-based composites (both thermoplastic and thermoset) offer a wide range of applications in various fields such as military protective suits, automotive, aerospace, electronics hardware, tribological application, and biomaterial implants, and this issue of Textile Progress explores the behaviour of UHMWPE with different matrix systems for various purposes. UHMWPE is widely used in the development of ballistic protective armours. Apart from applications where impact resistance is a key requirement, UHMWPE-based composites are currently being employed in the fields such as biomedical implants, anti-friction systems, dielectric and acoustic applications, and other structural fields; the UHMWPE should be extractable from the thermoplastic types and be able to be recycled. The various manufacturing techniques employed in the preparation of UHMWPE and its composites are discussed as are improvements aimed at eradicating existing processing issues associated with UHMWPE.

Printed electronics (PE) is one of the most dynamic technologies in the world. It proposes low-cost electronic network production in flexible substrates by numerous printing techniques, (screen printing, gravure, offset, flexographic, and inkjet printing), used in various industries. In PE, ink pigments are replaced by metallic particles or precursors that transmit electrical conductivity to the printed patterns such as carbon, polymers and conductive pigments. Conductive inks play an important role in printed electronics, and despite the number of conductive ink types available on the market, there are still issues to be addressed. Some of these restrictions include the use of toxic chemical reagents and solvents and complicated manufacturing protocols, which often make the industrialization of conductive inks an even more distant goal. In particular, conductive inks based on silver nanoparticles, Graphene and PEDOT:PSS are widely studied thanks to their high electrical conductivity. On the other hand, there is still work to be done to show the interest of inks based on phthalocyanine pigments, in particular copper phthalocyanine. Nevertheless, problems related to stability, dispersion and annealing temperature often limit the application of these four types of fillers. In this review, we present general information on available conductive fillers used for the formulation of conductive inks, focusing on metallic particles, carbon fillers, pigments and polymers. The influence and technical requirements of the regularly used printing techniques, as well as the post-processing treatments to achieve the targeted performance in the obtained inks have been discussed. In addition, the surface characteristics of the various types of extensible and flexible substrates used in portable electronics are described. Moreover, some types of printed flexible electronic components as well as notable applications of electronic textiles in various sectors are exhibited. Next, the major challenges for the manufacturing of printed flexible electronics and recommendations for future research are discussed in this review

The ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) is at times mythologized and its purpose mistaken, and often people can become confused about what it means, does or aims to achieve; moreover, without a financial appraisal of the differences IoT can make to their own enterprise, business leaders may be content to watch and wait rather than to take a lead. This issue of Textile Progress aims to provide a guide to help navigation beyond general statements about IoT and to help those involved with the textile industry to make an informed decision about its potential value to them. The definitions of the Internet of Things (IoT) available in the literature, and those put forth by organizations working on IoT standards development, are reviewed along with its architecture, elements, standards and protocols to help provide an understanding of the concepts and goals of IoT. A broad overview of impediments challenging the progress of IoT, especially in relation to cybersecurity, is provided. This review also compares ongoing work in the application of IoT in the textile industry to that in other manufacturing sectors whilst focussing on the interpretation of IoT technologies and their potential application to the textile industry according to both technological and business perspectives. A specific case study for the spinning industry is conducted to help with evaluation of its IoT solutions and to help to address how other parts of the textile industry might benefit from its application. The case study includes evaluation of IoT solutions in the spinning industry spanning the period between ITMA 2011 to 2019, and takes information from interviews with industry executives to inform future directions of IoT in the spinning industry.

The underlying principles of colour forecasting now have a history spanning a full century. This issue of Textile Progress is somewhat timely as the challenges that industry face now differ from those of the twentieth century, in particular, the increased need to address sustainability and the increased competiveness of the global marketplace. This Textile Progress provides an overview of the historical context drawing out the importance of the role of colour forecasting in the fashion and textile industries. It provides a detailed analysis of the more-recently established and establishing trend forecasting methods with a view to thinking more innovatively about the potential of colour forecasting. It investigates the effects and impact of colour and trend forecasting with a particular focus on the consequences of the process and system on business, on consumers and on the environment. In reviewing the developments in colour forecasting, we begin with the subjective techniques highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches. The more-objective characteristics that have emerged from new developments and new thinking provide a focus on the potential for greater accuracy in colour forecasting. This issue of Textile Progress explains how and why colour forecasting is an essential component of the business of making and selling fashion garments, through merchandising, retailing and fashion marketing, as well as being important in fashion design and product development processes. Developments affecting the design of colour forecasting systems are shown to draw on marketing theory, though without much consideration for the human-business interface, specifically, colour preferences, colour psychology and cultural meanings of colour. The overall aim of this Textile Progress is to assist an understanding of the colour forecasting process and its contribution to the larger trend forecasting system, and to highlight the challenges the colour forecasting sector faces for a twenty-first century fashion-business strategy. Attention is paid to the colour forecasting process and forecasting as a system, including its application in the design process and skills acquisition. The more-recently established trend forecasting methods are critically analysed, as are previously unpublished contributions to knowledge through original sets of primary research data, and finally potential improvements are suggested.