 We now have an interesting story from China, but it's going to be told to you by a German who's been employed for some years by this Chinese company. It is called in the short form Wafeng, and Thomas Schmidt is going to tell you a little about the company and his work, which sounds very interesting as director of innovation. Hello. Wafeng is a large textile manufacturer with a reputation of supplying most innovative material to the sport industry. Our customers today are all the major big sport brands like Nike, like Adidas, like Under Armour, Sketchers and many others. We manufacture high quality textiles with a modern state-of-the-art technology, different type of knitting and weaving machines. We do the dyeing process, the digital printing, and also we developed a very new 3D coating technology for textile. We call it Haptic because Haptic allows us to create 3D surfaces on top of a textile where we can have a touch experience. Within that Haptic technology we also want to integrate some smart electronics now and create some special high-tech products. We in ID TechX, years ago I was involved in our first report on e-tech styles. We were looking there mainly at e-fibers. We realised it was a long-term thing, but there was the European project with five countries involved in doing fibers that would have a super-capacitor first layer and a second layer of a dye-sensitised solar cell photovoltaics. So it sounded like magic. Your shirt could not only capture enough energy to charge your phone, it could store it until you needed to. That project I think is probably finished now. It's called PowerWeave, but there are other projects as well now in terms of at the University of Salford in Britain. They're working Professor Suarez who's lectured here at this event. They work on piezoelectric and photovoltaics on a fibre. But again, this sort of thing is long-term. It's nice to think of it on an airship or on to sales of a sailing boat and how that sort of thing might be able to provide electricity from the rain and the wind and the sun. But this is, I think, a fairly distant proposition. So I think your interest is on what sort of timescale at Wafeanian. What timescale are you trying to find these for? Actually, I mean China is well known for being a manufacturing place and a quick-to-production place. However, we have set up a very modern innovation department and also a modern innovation strategy. So we work on different timescales. We have teams working on the close-to-market innovations within half a year, one-year seasonal changes of the products. But we also have a long-term strategic research where we look into three years, five years time span and where we try to identify new technologies and bring them to China wherever we find them in the world. We also develop new technologies in China for sure. Then we try to put it together within an innovation network where we have partners, government-funded projects, innovative partner companies. And we try to put the system together and then offer it to our customers. The people watching this video, we would hope our gang to approach you with any ideas they have, you welcome ideas and inventions, as long as they're not extremely speculative and very long-term. More than fibres, presumably, because fibres is probably beyond the five-year span, isn't it, in terms of any clever fibres, other than just conducted ones. For you, it's ways of putting laminate on textiles, is it? And is it exclusively apparel? Actually, we have lots of different products and we start actually by manufacturing our own fibres. So we have our own yarn factories in China, but we also do the knitting and the weaving process. So we make the fabric as well and we do the finishing process as well, where we can also add some cautics on top of the fabric. So we are very versatile actually. What application? The application, we serve both industries, the footwear and the apparel industry and mainly for the sport industry. So we are very much focused on sporting goods, sport sneakers and sport apparel, mainly made out of synthetic fibres, polyester nylon, spandex for stretchable fabrics and absolutely sure we are looking for specialized fibres as well, conductive fibres, infrared-absorbing fibres, keep you warm, keep you cold, functionality. Moisture management plays a very important role and the moisture management can be achieved by the fibre itself, but also by chemical treatments after the fabric manufacturing. And also we do some coatings like the haptic 3D coatings where we add some value into the fabric or on top of the fabric. And we also supply finished components to the footwear factories. For the haptic, for example, we not only produce a roll of fabric, but we cut it in small pieces. We do the 3D coating and we supply ready-to-assemble components to factories. Human beings are something incredible, like 95% of your living time, you're in contact with textiles. And so they're pretty central to human race, aren't they? So from your point of view, that's inorganics, it's organics, it's composites, it's anything that may do a good job, but it has to be washable, does it? Yes, washability is very important for textiles because we all sweat, we all get dirty. So integrating electronics into fabric is not that easy because of the waterproof properties. We also need to consider chemical safety, actually. Our customers and the consumer markets are very sensitive to toxicity and chemicals or heavy metals or whatever is used in electronic industry might not be suitable for consumer products in the textile markets. So we have to be very careful in developing environmentally friendly products, products which can be easily recycled, where we can at least take out the electronics and bring it to another disposal stream later on, if necessary, or some really non-toxic electronics that would be our dream. Yes, we are very concerned in ID TechEx. That's why at this event, for the first time, we have this award for the Toxicant Replacement Hero. So it's a company or person who's been involved in finding a good alternative for these things that have the toxicants in. It's not just whether the substance is toxic in its use, they usually are not, but it's when it's toxic, when it is disposed of, or something is abused, if it is overheated, it's in a fire or anything like that. And we're quite disturbed that we were able to do a roadmap of the next 10 years, and every year there are several things coming out with either lead or cadmium or heavy metals, bismuth, or breaking down to form cyanide and so on. And it's particularly true of some sectors like photovoltaics, but there are versions that are totally non-toxic, that are not exact replacements, but I think a very good job is done of finding various organisations have data sources so that if a manufacturer like you today wanted to find an alternative to some battery that was non-toxic or something, there are databases for that. But what we've tried to do is look forward because you're quickly getting buried in the new things. And the new things, you don't know what they're going to have, what poisons they're going to have in unless you have very close attention, and certainly you don't know what alternatives are being developed that you should really prefer your investment towards, put it towards, because it reduces your risk. And obviously it's an ethical thing too, I think, that worry is that like textiles, we've had other things like smart windows, they're going to be used in huge amounts, most of them, and so it may be something that doesn't seem much of a toxicity risk, but then it is because it's going to have uncontrolled disposal and be out there in very large numbers, and we all have a responsibility on that, I guess. So you're concerned about the emission of gases if it's abused or if it is when it is disposed of, that sort of thing, I guess. I mean the end of life disposal is important to control it and to have the right type of recycling ways to bring it back into the circular economy, but also during the use it is very important that there's no migration of toxic chemicals to the skin. We talk about skin contact materials with clothing, and also during manufacturing, also our workers need to be safer using these chemicals. So chemical safety is a big, big topic in these consumer markets, and I mean we serve the reporting industry, people who prefer a healthy lifestyle, people who go outdoor to enjoy the nature, and for these products we need to make sure it matches the expectation of the consumers that everything is safe and healthy, and we try very hard and whenever we start a new innovation project we evaluate the environmental performance and we direct our innovation into a direction where we feel it is safe to use. The surface irritant, there are other names for it, but the blue asbestos sort of story where we don't have blue asbestos anymore, but that's not wasn't chemically reactive. The fact was that the fibers went through your body and caused all manner of pathologies along the way, so that wasn't a chemical toxicant, but it was very serious. So people talk of carbon nanotubes if they were free in the air being a bit of a problem, possibly the longer ones are a bit of a problem, but on the other hand from what we saw the far more serious things were these very nasty chemicals that have chemical action. Do you look at both of those or do you feel that the chemicals action is the main thing you have to look out for? No, actually both of them are important and I mean carbon nanotubes you mentioned them, we feel it is too unsafe for using consumer products right now, we just don't know enough about it. We feel much better for graphene, but all the graphene needs to be evaluated carefully on human toxicity and the chemical safety, chemical toxicity by let's say heavy metals or some kind of treatment chemicals we put on inside the yarns or on top of the chemical coatings, dye stuff of yarns that need to be well controlled and there are non-toxic dye stuff available and there are some old style adso dye stuff available which may be cheaper but not really good for health that need to be very closely monitored and controlled and we do it ourselves, also our customers, the sport brands do a great job in changing the supply chain, taking care about wastewater treatment and that all the suppliers comply to these standards of engagement. We've read some scientific reports which expressed concern that sometimes you may feel you have very little of something like carbon nanotubes or refined particles, carbon particles and you have very little of some chemical poison but sometimes there's some of the research seems to indicate that they can leverage each other and that was they can have a multiplier effect so you you mustn't relax even if it's small quantities particularly if you have a surface irritant as well as a chemical reactant I don't do you can counter that or anything I don't know I mean there's so much that's not known that's the point isn't it really? It's really a big unknown area on toxicity that's why we have to be double careful and really only use the safe materials and this is somehow a conflict when moving now into the sensors and the electronic business where electronic industry is just operating in a different way and using different materials not that close to the consumer and to the consumer's skin they usually they're encapsulated in some machines and in computers and so you don't touch them directly having these chemicals on the textile is something different and we need to watch out to use safe sensors, safe electronics, safe connecting wiring and I think it can be done there are lots of options available but but selecting the right options and working with the right partners is getting more and more important. Very large one I gather how big is it now? Yes actually the company was founded about 20 years ago out of nothing and it's a really amazing Chinese growth story. Today we have about 4,500 employees and we are still growing rapidly and we have a plan within two to three years we want to reach 10,000 employees and we are growing in all different segments on our knitting capacity on our weaving capacity we have set up a brand new modern dyehouse now with the state of the art wastewater treatment system that we apply to the strictest water regulations and we set up photovoltaic solar cells all on our roofs cover this solar panels we have wind power for our dyeing house so we also get very engaged in sustainable energy and try to change the supply chain of textile manufacturing. Thank you very much for your time we have to keep in contact with you and you have a wonderful job a fascinating job but obviously a very responsible one good luck thank you