Piana Technology, the 439-year-old Italian-made textile company, has installed a solar panel system at its nonwovens facility in Cartersville, Georgia. The company’s E/Smart high-performance nonwoven fibre technology was named as a CES 2022 Innovation Awards Honouree, and it received an honourable mention as one of Fast Company's World Changing Ideas.

The Georgia-based facility specialises in vertically- and cross-lapped nonwovens. Since 2016, the facility has manufactured a variety of intermediate products that are behind many of the common household products, the company said in a media release.

As part of its sustainability journey, Piana Technology has committed to shrink its climate impact with clean energy as part of the solution. The system went live on August 5.

Piana has partnered with Southern View Energy, a local solar electrical design and solar installation company, to carefully review the facility's energy profile and pilot an instalment project. The new 471 kW system is poised to supply over 622,000 kWh each year and avoid an estimated 460 tons of CO₂ a year, equivalent to 125 acres of trees. Although most of this energy will go towards the facility, on days where there is overproduction, energy will go back to the city of Cartersville for redistribution.

"This is our first PV system, so this is a huge step for us," said Daniela Leal, Piana's sustainability manager. "Our goal at Piana Technology is to cut our emissions in half in the next 2-3 years, so of course we want to exploit every meaningful opportunity to meet that goal. This new accomplishment is helping us do exactly that, and even as we're celebrating, we're looking ahead to the next project."