When you think of advanced futuristic clothing, what comes to mind?

Perhaps shirts that can detect and alert users to low blood glucose levels or socks that can track your running form, step count and speed? What about pyjamas that observe subtle bodily changes while you sleep leading to early detection of cancer or warn carers of imminent seizures? Imagine if all these were items that required no external power source, just the energy generated by your own body.

Although these products are not in the shops yet that day is not far off.

Researchers are already designing advanced textiles that look exactly like regular clothes or fabrics but come with with embedded electronic functions. These are referred to as electronics textiles, e-textiles or smart fabrics.

E-textiles integrate sensing, computation and power into fabrics so that the threads themselves become the sensors and the stitches become the circuits. These textiles can monitor health, temperature, motion and air quality. They can communicate wirelessly and harvest various forms of energy.

University and industry prototypes are currently progressing through clinical trials and are being tested outside labs. The global market for e-textiles is projected to reach over US$15 billion (£11.14 billion) by 2028.

Developments in e-textiles will revolutionise the way humanity views clothing; but at what cost?

A new type of waste

Electronic waste is the fastest growing EU waste stream with a record 62 million tonnes discarded in 2022.

Another 92 million tonnes of waste is generated globally from textiles; a figure expected to reach 134 million by 2030. Textiles alone account for 6.7% of global greenhouse gas emissions with the average European discarding a staggering 11kg of textiles per year.

Electronic textiles will bring a new kind of hybrid waste. E‑textiles commonly use mixed polymers, metal nanoparticle inks, and include components that create fire hazards within conventional textile recycling.

They can release toxic residues if incinerated or landfilled. This results in hazardous and precious materials becoming trapped within garments, leading not only to environmental and health problems, but to a loss of vital resources such as graphene and rare-earth elements. Silver, for instance, is used in conductive yarns, antimicrobial coatings, sensors and electrodes. We need to work out how to recover it because it is valuable as well as toxic to aquatic life in some forms.

So, it’s currently very difficult to recover the valuable materials used in smart clothing, after the shirt or socks are discarded.

At the current rate of e-textile growth, current disposal methods will need to change to cope with these new materials; particularly in the areas of reusability and recyclability.

The EU’s sustainable and circular textiles strategy is part of the EU’s plan to become the first climate-neutral continent. Regulators are now demanding clearer rules on recyclability, chemical safety and product lifespans, and starting to ask how e‑textiles will meet these requirements.

Industry practice is catching up more widely, and placing more responsibility on clothing producers. Digital product passports (these carry information about the materials and their environmental impact) and new recycling technologies are scaling up. These shifts mean manufacturers could face legal and commercial risk if they don’t consider the long-term impact of these products.

Preventing more waste

The good news is that sustainable e‑textiles are an engineering problem with practical solutions. Key measures that industry and funders could adopt now include:

1. design for disassembly. Removable electronic parts help separate electronics from textiles for recycling

2. material passports and transparency. Digital records of various components (such as polymers, inks and batteries) that enable safe sorting and recovery

3. biodegradable and recyclable conductors. Prioritising conductors free from precious metals and using alternatives such as screen printable carbon paste and recyclable conductive inks and yarns

4. energy-first design. Integrating textile energy harvesting (for instance, solar, thermoelectric, piezo/triboelectric nanogenerators) to reduce or eliminate batteries. Some garments embed antennas and wireless power receivers to avoid bulky batteries

5. standards for washability, durability and end-of-life testing. To ensure products survive real-world use and can be repaired rather than discarded.

None of these are optional extras: they determine whether e‑textiles become a public good or a new environmental liability. University research groups and industry consortia are starting to demonstrate printable, stretchable components and trial wireless power that reduce battery dependence, for instance. Printable, stretchable components are flexible electronic parts printed onto fabric that keep working as the textile bends and stretches. They make smart clothing comfortable, lightweight, washable and able to move naturally with the body.

Unless policymakers and industry players adopt sustainable design now, e-textiles could add a dangerous new layer to our global electronic waste mountain.

Governments need to set clear rules on recyclability and chemical safety for e‑textiles. University researchers must find methods to make e-textiles functional, affordable, sustainable and safe. Brands must publish material details and repair guides and ensure sustainable practices are being adhered to throughout their supply chain.

Investors should not fund throwaway novelty. Standards bodies must define test methods for washing, wear and end‑of‑life recovery.

These steps will steer the market toward durable, repairable and recyclable products that could change lives for the better.

Ian Williams receives funding from UK Research Councils, including the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and its Impact Acceleration Account.

Christina Webb receives funding from UK Research Councils, including the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Stephen Beeby receives funding from UK Research Councils, including the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

The ability to cross oceans has long been a marker of human endeavour, but when did the seas change from being barriers to movement into the maritime highways we know today?

For many years the answer was thought to lie in the Neolithic period – the time when humans made the profound transition from hunting and gathering to practising agriculture and living in settled societies.

Our team’s discovery of the presence of European hunter-gatherers on the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, reported last year, has overturned this view. It showed that people reached Malta from their starting point in Europe (presumably Sicily) at least 8,500 years ago.

In a new study, we show that these populations were engaging in repeated long-distance sea journeys of at least 100km, well before the advent of farming.

Researchers have known that the occasional very ancient sea crossing must have been made. The most famous example may be the colonisation of Australia, tens of thousands of years before the present.

However, sustained, long distance sea voyaging – particularly to small and remote islands – was long thought to have been beyond the capabilities of hunter-gatherers, who are dependant on the bounty, or deprivation, of natural resources.

This was also the case for Europe’s last hunter-gatherers, in the period of time known as the Mesolithic, the era before the Neolithic. During the Neolithic, a new population introduced agriculture to Europe from Anatolia (which comprises most of the landmass of modern Turkey).

Enter the recent findings from the site of Latnija, on Malta. Did the surprising presence of European hunter-gatherers on Malta reflect a one off, accidental crossing – or perhaps people who somehow became marooned on the island? Conversely, was this Mesolithic presence a reflection of something altogether different, and more complex?

Shifting seas

To explore these possibilities, we investigated whether Malta could support a viable forager population size that could have lived in isolation for the 1,000 year occupation of the island during the Mesolithic.

First, we explored the impacts of changing sea levels since the Last Glacial Maximum (the height of the last ice age), from around 21,000 years ago. This was when waters began to rise from their lowest levels of around 130m below modern sea level. By doing this, we were able to track changes in the size of Malta and its connectivity with surrounding islands and land masses.

During the Last Glacial Maximum, Malta was connected to Sicily by a land bridge, and this connection remained as sea levels continued to rise until around 14,000 years ago, when the land bridge began to be inundated. Continued sea level rise meant that within less than a thousand years, Malta had become far smaller and remote from Sicily, needing a long-distance sea crossing for connectivity.

By the time of the Mesolithic occupation, Malta had almost reached its present configuration, with no significant difference in distances to Sicily. Having understood how sea level rise impacted the size and accessibility of Malta, we next explored how its specific ecological conditions impacted its ability to support forager populations. Since hunter-gatherers are reliant on what nature provides, their population sizes have a direct relationship with ecological productivity.

Accordingly, we modelled the relationship between population density among contemporary forager populations and what’s known as net primary productivity – effectively the baseline of wild resources available to hunter-gatherers. We then extrapolated these findings back into the past using high resolution computer models of past climates (palaeoclimate models).

This enabled us to calculate the total population size that could be supported first on the combined landmass of Malta and Sicily, and then as separate islands as sea levels rose.

Our upper estimates for the total population sizes suggest that after the inundation of the land bridge to Sicily, the total population size that could be theoretically supported on Malta dropped rapidly to 319 people by 13,800 years ago.

There is no evidence yet that people were living on Malta this early, but our models showed that any populations present would have continued to drop in size as sea levels rose until around 9,000 years ago, when it could have accommodated around 170-144 people.

Finally, we compared these findings to thresholds, informed by conservation genetic studies, for the long-term viability and stability of a population. These thresholds suggest the need for an effective (reproducing) population size of 1,000 or more, equivalent to a total population size of 2,500-3,000 (because the total population size includes both younger and older people who are not reproducing).

Long distance voyages

This suggests that Malta was incapable of hosting an isolated, viable population that could have lived continuously through the 1,000-year time frame during which it was settled by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.

Consequently, we can rule out the persistence of a population stranded on Malta as sea levels inundated the land bridge to Sicily. We can also exclude a single, perhaps unintended, voyage leaving marooned mariners on Malta.

The only alternative is that these Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were making repeated, long distance sea voyages between at least Malta and Sicily, the closest land mass, to maintain the genetic connections that ensured at least a millennium of Mesolithic viability on Malta.

These insights are reshaping our perceptions of late European hunter-gatherers and the sophistication of their societies. To maintain repeated, long-distance overseas connections, they must have had, and conserved, an extensive knowledge of land, sea and sky, as well as the technological know-how for building and preserving sea craft.

We don’t know for certain what type of vessels the hunter-gatherers were using, although we know that dug-out canoes existed at this time. The crossings to Malta occurred several thousand years before the earliest evidence for sails – making the achievement even more impressive.

From wayfinding to getting food at sea overnight, they then had to be able to live sustainably on a small, semi-arid island, which required a finely-tuned knowledge of diverse food sources shaped by the seasons.

With these implicit capabilities, we can then start to ask, where else did they go? There is already evidence of connectivity between Europe and North Africa during this time. Previous work using ancient DNA found the distinctive signature of European hunter-gatherer ancestry in people living in pre-Neolithic Tunisia.

All this suggests we may be looking at a hitherto unknown web of overseas links that marked the beginning of the connected world we know today, centuries before the first farmers reached the central Mediterranean.

Understanding how these groups remained ecologically resilient, while also shaping ecosystems to their needs, may yet prove to have important lessons for humanity’s current and future challenges in a rapidly warming world. As we continue to unravel Malta’s unprecedented hunter-gatherer past, we hope to shed light on this lost ecological knowledge.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.