Advisory Board profile: Confezioni Mario De Cecco
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
Confezioni Mario De Cecco is an Italian company with over 60 years of experience in the production of workwear and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). With a strong focus on worker safety, health and protection, the company operates in a highly demanding sector where garments must meet strict technical requirements and comply with internationally recognised ISO standards.
Their products are designed to deliver advanced performance features such as waterproofing, resistance to fire and heat, antistatic properties and high visibility, all essential to ensure safety in professional environments. Achieving these functionalities has traditionally required the use of specific chemical substances, which today are increasingly under scrutiny due to their potential long-term environmental and health impacts. For Confezioni Mario De Cecco, this represents both a challenge and an opportunity: to innovate towards solutions that maintain performance while eliminating potentially critical components, ensuring safer and more sustainable products.
The company’s interest in BioSusTex stems from its broader commitment to sustainability and collaboration. Recognising the importance of working closely with industry partners, academia and local stakeholders, Confezioni Mario De Cecco joined the Advisory Board after being introduced to the project by Prof. Elena Semenzin (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice). The project’s focus on eliminating PFAS from textile products and advancing sustainable alternatives strongly resonated with their strategic priorities.
From their perspective, two of the most critical areas for the future of the textile sector are the elimination of PFAS and the recycling of cellulosic textiles. Addressing these challenges simultaneously offers a concrete opportunity to rethink and partially redefine textile production systems through a circular economy approach. This transition requires not only improvements in processes, but also a fundamental shift in how materials are selected and used, from the very beginning of the value chain, to ensure consistency, safety and sustainability across the entire product lifecycle.
Confezioni Mario De Cecco emphasises the importance of strong research and development ecosystems, supported by strategic partnerships and adequate investment. In their view, innovation must be accompanied by a clear focus on scalability from the outset, ensuring that promising solutions can move beyond the laboratory and be implemented at industrial scale. This is essential for enabling the wider market to benefit from research outcomes and for turning innovation into real, measurable impact.
Looking ahead, the company’s ambition is clear: to bring to market high-performance workwear that delivers the same level of protection currently ensured by PFAS-based solutions, while eliminating their associated risks to human health and the environment. At present, PFAS have been replaced by the company wherever possible with alternative materials that still ensure full compliance with the relevant ISO requirements. Current legislation allows the use of PFAS only under specific exemptions and exclusively in certain application sectors (e.g. military use). Through its role on the BioSusTex Advisory Board, Confezioni Mario De Cecco contributes a practical, performance-driven perspective, helping ensure that sustainability innovations meet the rigorous demands of real-world applications.