ONE-LOOP

Industrialising the upcycling of end-of-life personal protective equipment (PPE), starting with firefighters’ gear, through the automation of dismantling, cutting and manufacturing processes.

Every year, French fire and rescue services decommission thousands of items of personal protective equipment (PPE): fire suits, hoses, high-visibility garments. These multi-material products (textile, leather, plastic, rubber), designed to last, are incinerated for lack of a structured recovery channel.

Wecameca Factory has proven that industrial upcycling of this PPE is possible. In a pilot project conducted with 8 departmental fire and rescue services, the company collected, qualified, dismantled and transformed 1.2 tonnes of decommissioned PPE into 350 functional upcycled products, tested and sold to those same services. A framework supply agreement is being signed with SDMIS (Rhone fire and rescue service), securing both feedstock and commercial outlets.

An analysis of the times measured during the pilot reveals the structure of the operating cost: 47% for dismantling, 23% for cutting and preparation, 30% for manufacturing and assembly. The raw material cost is 0%: the feedstock is supplied by its owners, sometimes at negative cost. This is what makes the model economically singular. To reach industrial scale, the dismantling + cutting block (70% of total cost) must be automated and the manufacturing block
(30%) optimised. These two axes structure the project.

The ONE-LOOP project tackles these two bottlenecks. With INSA Lyon, it produces the technical specifications for automating dismantling and multi-material cutting. In parallel, it builds the operation sequences and line balancing that industrialise the garment assembly chain. A digital materials repository and a complete commercial model (T4) complete the system.

At the end of the project, Wecameca will have a documented process, automation specifications and an industrialised production organisation, enabling the move from TRL7 to TRL8. The model is transferable to professional textile owners in other Member States, facing the same waste streams and obligations.

• Name of the call for projects: Elevatex
• Market(s): Protection/
  Security & Defence
• Project leader: Wecameca Factory
• Budget: 30 000€
• Year(s): 2026