Gaston College s Textile Technology Centre is contributing to production of fibre from plastic, as part of efforts by a start-up - The New Norm - to make sustainable textiles..
The Textile Technology Center Helps Develop Plastic To Fiber For Recycled Fabric-Making Start-Up, The New Norm textileworld.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from textileworld.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Gaston County commissioners are expected to green light the construction of a one-of-a-kind fiber prototyping center at Gaston College’s Kimbrell Campus in Belmont later this month.
Commissioners recently agreed to vote on a transfer of $5.3 million Gaston County CARES Act funding to Gaston College for the college’s proposed Fiber Innovation Center – a state-of-the-art addition to Gaston College’s Textile Technology Center to help test and develop new fiber products for the center s clients.
Such a center would develop and test products - such as personal protective equipment commonly used to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and “smart textiles” for the defense industry - made with a number of innovative, engineered properties, such as ceramics, metals, composites and electronic materials, among many others.
That conclusion is not immediately clear from looking at the data of the last 20 years.
Even as the population has increased from roughly 141,700 people in 2000 to nearly 160,000 now, the total workforce has fallen.
In 2000, there were nearly 101,900 people employed across all industries in the county, according to state data for the second quarter of that year.
The workforce has still not reached its turn-of-the-century peak. The closest it got was when the total number employed surpassed 89,000 in 2019 before falling to roughly 78,200 under the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic this year.
Taylor Dellinger, a data analyst at the Western Piedmont Council of Governments, said the drop is a testament to both the severity of the 2000s recessions in the area and the increasing age of the population.
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