LESS WASTE AND MORE INCLUSION: IN THE COVID ERA, EUROPEAN DESIGNERS START AGAIN FROM RAW MATERIALS AND CO-CREATION

30^th November 2020 – A collection of leather bags made from apple waste, designer eyewear created specifically for “Afropolitans”, innovative curtains that change color with the passage of time, luxury shoes with interchangeable and recyclable jeweled heels, a platform where designers and customers can co-create through new processes of collaboration, garments that clean      oceans and the earth from plastic wastes: the green and inclusive vocation of new generations of European designers goes beyond regional borders and shares resources, combining and renewing them, to create value through new forms of interaction.

“The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic has radically changed the way we work, use technology, and relate to others, bringing society’s attention back to the impact of man on nature more than ever before – underlines Korinna Mollá of Aitex, leader of the Consortium headed by WORTH Partnership Project. In the front line, young European designers are committed to questioning the pillars of society, to highlight the defects of our business models and production processes, to rethink the problem of the exploitation of ecosystems by experimenting with new materials, innovative production models and alternative solutions that are crying out for digitization, multifunctionality and collaboration in the name of sustainability and inclusion”.

Funded by COSME, the European Union’s Programme for the Competitiveness of Small and Medium Enterprises, WORTH Partnership Project is Europe’s largest creative incubator where designers experience the benefits of transnational collaborations to create innovative products and processes that benefit from the participation of over 500 million people in an internal market. It is a four-year project that, through three calls, has led to the selection of 152 projects involving 345 partners from 34 EU-COSME countries – from France to Germany, Spain, UK Italy, not forgetting the Netherlands, Slovenia, Moldova, Estonia, Sweden, Finland, Montenegro, Serbia, etc..

The last call, the third, registered 169 partnership candidates, 97 pre-selected projects from 32 countries of the European Union. 64 were the winning partnerships formed by 147 international partners from 30 different countries.

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