Textiles are valuable elements that make up Romania’s cultural heritage, being unique through the production techniques, materials used and their significance for the Romanian population. Heritage textiles represent bridges between past and present, kept in collections from different types of buildings. Many of them are preserved and exposed in heritage buildings that are open for public viewing and do not benefit from internal microclimate monitoring systems. These things can have serious repercussions on the integrity and conservation status of these fragile materials. The chapter proposes to analyze the approaches used in different studies to evaluate the risks to which the historical textile collections from Romania are exposed, depending on the place and the way in which they are kept. All these approaches aim to determine the degree of conservation of the materials and their implications on the health of the people with whom they come into contact. Based on the methodology applied in the studies already published, examined in the first part of the chapter, in the second part, a case study was performed on a different sample of historical textiles from Romania. This comes to complete the sphere of knowledge in the field.
Part of the book: Waste in Textile and Leather Sectors