FIX, the material generated from textile laundry waste, wins the James Dyson Award 2023

Maria Mei, Mario and Núria, three young students of the Industrial Design Engineering Degree and the Degree in Design and Innovation of Elisava School just won the prestigious James Dyson Award with FIX, an innovative proposal to recover the wet solid waste from laundry machines and generate a new material.

The honor is the prestigious James Dyson Award, promoted by the James Dyson Foundation, aimed at young people from around the world, which seeks to encourage, drive, and inspire the next generation of engineers to develop solutions that solve society’s problems. In this year’s edition, more than 200 students from 24 universities and design schools in Spain participated in the James Dyson Award, and the three winners were selected with the FIX project to recover textile waste from laundry machines to reduce the release of microplastics into the environment and turn them into a new material.

FIX was created as part of the collaboration agreement between Girbau LAB and Elisava to bring young talent to the company.

“The challenge of the project arose as a proposal from Girbau LAB to our university, Elisava. The company is aware of the environmental impact of the laundry industry and the idea of finding a solution that would prevent microplastics from ending up in the water flow was proposed to us students. This proposal was completely in line with our professional interests and our concerns about the current environmental crisis, so we got to work with great enthusiasm and motivation. After a lot of research and prototypes, we ended up with the result, which is the FIX project,” explains Mario Sanz.

The collaboration between both entities allows to bring young people closer to the methodologies, dynamics, and processes of the industrial sector that students incorporate in their final proposal in a natural way. “Thanks to all these tests, we were able to obtain the final material in various formats, such as pellet and 3D printing filament, so that it could be incorporated into current industrial processes,” tells us María Mei Bellsolà, member of the FIX team.

The James Dyson Award is the best recognition of the work of these young people and highlights the shared commitment of all stakeholders with the environment and the circular economy.

“We can only be grateful to the jury of the James Dyson Award national edition for choosing us as winners. We are proud to receive an award of this level and to see that all the effort made has been worth it. It is a satisfaction for us to see that companies as important as Dyson make student projects visible and value them to give them a chance in the world of engineering and innovation.”, comments Núria Fandos, a participant in the FIX project.

With this national award, the three young people qualify for the international phase of the award in which, in the event that FIX is included in the Top20 list to be made public in October, the inventor James Dyson will personally evaluate their proposal. Congratulations!