Felt from Textile Waste

Circular Jacket Challenge · Challenge partner: Davide Balda / FILSE (IT)

The material works. It is made by hand, in a studio, with a small machine. What does not exist yet is the path from studio to factory.

From waste to material

Davide Balda is a material designer based in Liguria, working under the name Archeomaterico. He has developed a felting process that turns textile scraps, offcuts and end-of-life garments into a versatile material using water, soap and mechanical action. Unlike conventional felting, his method handles the fibres the industry rejects — cotton, polyester, elastane and mixed blends alongside wool — and the felt can be re-felted at end of life.

The material has been used in alpine clothing (an underjacket developed for ASTER), agriculture (a fibre substrate tested with Politecnico di Milano), construction insulation, interior design (Milano Design Week 2025) and industrial composites (produced at scale with Chroma Composites). Davide is building Telare la Materia, a startup for textile waste regeneration, and takes part in the sprint through FILSE, the regional development agency of Liguria.

The problem: textile waste has nowhere useful to go

Two EU rules have changed what has to happen to textile waste. Since January 2025 separate collection has been mandatory across the Union. And since 19 July 2026, Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 prohibits large companies from destroying unsold or returned clothing, footwear and accessories — destruction is permitted only in narrowly defined, documented cases. Medium-sized companies follow in 2030.

Collection without reuse only moves the problem: waste still goes to landfill, incineration, or out of Europe. What is missing is a scalable way to turn it into something valuable at the point of production. The ban took effect in July and will be four months old when this sprint runs — brands are in their first compliance season, and they need destinations.

The opportunity: it works, but not at scale

Depending on the input, the felt absorbs water vapour up to a third of its own weight without feeling wet, thermoregulates against cold and heat, and can be treated with lanolin for water resistance. In principle it can be produced industrially with needle-punching and thermal bonding. In practice the process is entirely artisanal: Davide works in his own studio with a small machine, felting by hand and assembling with a sewing machine.

Why this is hard: you cannot choose the colour

The colour of the finished felt depends entirely on which waste fibres went into it. It cannot be selected, matched or repeated. For design objects and limited collections that is a signature — every piece visibly tells the story of its origin. For industrial buyers it is a serious obstacle: no seasonal colourways, no brand palette, no consistency between batches.

Any path to industrial production has to answer this: sort the input to control the output, work with a limited palette that mixed waste can reliably produce, or find buyers for whom variability is the point. The new stream of unsold stock may change the maths — garments a brand may no longer destroy arrive sorted, in batches, often in one colourway and a known composition. Whether that is the route to a controllable palette is an open question.

What we are looking for

Davide’s own assessment is that scaling needs three things: machinery to turn raw textile waste into usable fibre at industrial speed, a line that produces felt from that fibre at a commercially viable rate, and an assembly line to turn felt into finished goods. Teams are welcome to question that sequence — whether all three need to be owned, or whether existing nonwoven capacity could carry part of it, is exactly the kind of question worth attacking.

The jacket is one application among many; the felt and the process are the product. We are looking for concrete, feasible proposals — a production roadmap, a partnership model, a cost comparison, a market entry strategy. Not slide decks with abstract principles.

Find your angle

The prize

{{TBD: Prize noch mit Davide Balda / FILSE zu bestätigen}}

Sign up for the kickoff

Part of the Circular Jacket Challenge, 26–27 November 2026 — a two-day Innovation Sprint under the Interreg Alpine Space project ASTER, powered by InnoDays.