CORONA - CorTEX - Identification and definition of fields of action for the substitution of petrochemical materials in textile medical disposables with reference to the current Corona pandemic.

The Corona pandemic posed an unprecedented challenge to the nation's medical supply infrastructures. Particularly in the area of textile medical disposables (tmE), there were sometimes unforeseeable supply bottlenecks with urgently needed medical material. Especially in this application field, there are strong dependencies on outsourced value chains and raw material supply process chains, which can lead to critical bottlenecks in the sometimes sensitive medical infrastructure. The CorTEX project therefore aims to identify and analyze substitution potentials, taking into account regionally available materials and processing capacities, regionally available know-how, and ecologically questionable petrochemical raw materials in tmE. Preferred fields of action are to be delineated in which material substitution leads to significant improvements in product-specific life cycle assessments and to the stabilization of supply chains in the event of a pandemic. The latter can potentially be achieved through the regionalization of value chains (predominantly national value creation through complementary integration of international partners). The identification of basic technical requirements, competencies and know-how of regional actors as well as the analysis of the current supply infrastructure with tmE are the first priority. The analysis of concrete fields of application for the identification of the greatest possible ecological potentials as well as investigations for the practical validation of the feasibility of potential-rich raw material/material substitutions will take place in a second step.