Advanced photocatalytic textiles to remediate urban air pollution

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Most urban areas worldwide are facing pollution as a major challenge in city management. The World Health Organization estimates that 3.8 million people die prematurely because of that. Clean technologies and environment remediation technologies are a major focus both on the EU and abroad. The European Union has budgeted over 300 billion € for the next multiannual financial period. ETISILK, a 200-year-old family-owned textile company, has developed an innovative textile fabric coated with a nanophotocatalysts that can remediate urban pollution maintenance-free and low-cost. Treated fabrics can degrade air pollutants like NOx, organic fractions in the suspended particles (PM10 and PM2.5) and other volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into harmless substances. CLEAN-Photo-TEX is a complete game-changer solution to remediate the pollution in cities and improve the quality of life of humanity. The photocatalytic technology embedded in ETISILK advanced textiles for architecture and decoration of cities merges both design elegance and sustainability by becoming air cleaners in cities without energy consumption or maintenance thanks to the solar activation. The current construction market is booming, with particular growth in South East Asia. The estimates from the World Economic Forum are that 2 billion new homes are needed in the next 80 years to account for economic development and population growth. ETISILK addressable market for CLEAN-Photo-TEX is at least of 3 billion €/year for new buildings (at lower average of 20 sq m of fabric per new building, estimated at 25 million a year worldwide) plus the latent potential for refurbishing current buildings with panels of treated photocatalytic textiles. During the first 5 years of commercial exploitation, we foresee accumulated sales over 46+M€ and profits of 9+M€ with increase of the workforce in ETISILK of at least 20 FTE positions, both in production site and in commercial department.