Background

The textile sector faces major challenges in their quest to mitigate their negative environmental and social impacts. The current business models based on fast fashion and quantity over quality in garments needs to be substituted with more circular models. Re-use and recycling are typically at the top of the sustainability and circularity debate, but remanufacturing doesn’t appear as often in the discussions. There are few studies that explore the environmental, social and economic profile of remanufacturing practices in Europe.

tExtended (link) is a Horizon Europe project whose main goal is to create a knowledge-based blueprint for extended textile circularity. The basis of the blueprint is a Conceptual Framework determining the optimized utilization of textile flows, aiming for retention of value of materials in a safe and sustainable way. To build this framework, all the possible circular utilization routes need to be assessed from a sustainability perspective. RISE leads the sustainability assessment work package in tExtended, and this thesis will contribute to this work package.

Description

The goal of this thesis is to carry out a life cycle sustainability assessment of textile waste remanufacturing. The work requires establishing a definition and delimitation of remanufacturing, based on the context of tExtended and dialogue with other researchers in the consortium. This could be done by identifying what are the most common remanufacturing practices in Sweden and Europe, which would lead to selecting a series of case studies as the most representative in the sector. Then, a sustainability assessment will be carried out with a life cycle approach. Life cycle assessment (LCA) will be central to the study, to be complemented with cost estimations and a qualitative assessment of the social dimension.

Key Responsibilities

• Identifying the most representative remanufacturing practices in Sweden and Europe, via dialogue with representatives from other tExtended partners.
• Defining one to three case studies of manufacturing schemes to be the study object.
• Carrying out a life cycle assessment (LCA) to estimate the environmental effects of these schemes.
• Estimate the costs of these schemes and discuss their potential social impacts.

Qualifications

Our ideal candidate would have some textile engineering background, and basic knowledge of life cycle assessment. We at RISE have a strong LCA competence and will provide the required supervision. We would like you to bring to the table knowledge or a passion for textiles and how they are manufactured. Still, we prefer candidates who have at least studied one life cycle assessment course.

Terms

Scope: 30 credits, one semester full-time

Location: Mölndal

Start: Flexible, but not later than august 2025

Compensation: 1333 SEK/credit (before tax). For 30 credits: 39990SEK

Welcome with your application!

Last day of application: July 31^st, 2025.
Contact: Diego.Penaloza@ri.se

In this process, we do not request a personal letter. Instead, we ask you to answer a number of selection questions that help us better understand your skills and experience in relation to the advertised position.