Funding for sustainable developments

Sustainability criteria are becoming increasingly important as guidelines and requirements for R&D funding, both at the national and European levels. Lenzing, which has been active in this field for a long time, uses this opportunity to boost in-house developments. Furthermore, the Group is also active in cooperative research projects.

In 2023 and 2024, Lenzing stepped up its activities in the field of EU-funded projects, which are also useful for networking and building new cooperations. Lenzing is now a research project partner in CISUTAC, LIFE-TREATS (Textile Recycling in Europe at Scale), ESCIB (Developing environmental sustainability & circularity assessment methodologies for industrial bio-based systems) and CELLFIL. In the LIFE TREATS project, Lenzing collaborates with its long-term partner Södra. For more information on the collaboration with Södra, please see the “Resource use and circular economy stakeholder engagement” section in the “E5 Resource Use and circular Economy” chapter. CELLFIL engages sustainability aspects of a lyocell filament value chain, with Lenzing as one of the partners and technical coordinators. Several other proposals are pending. For more information, please see the “Research collaborations” section in this chapter.

Resource- and energy-efficient production processes (including R&D infrastructure) are the foundation for the development of new innovations that offer both sustainability and performance. These fibers serve as raw materials for the textile and nonwoven industries, and are often developed together with value chain partners or other stakeholders, mostly for tailoring new fiber products to specific applications.