Peter Majeranowski, CEO of textile-to-textile recycling innovator Circ, said he was leaving Textile Exchange’s conference in Lisbon more optimistic than before he arrived.
It was a rare moment of positivity for an industry mired in no small amount of doom-and-gloomism as corporate sustainability targets become increasingly untethered to economic realities and Europe’s simplification of environmental reporting and supply chain due diligence rules is beginning to appear like deregulation by a different name. But beneath the frayed nerves, questioning glances and pained shrugs runs an undercurrent of resilience, he said.
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“I feel an energy,” Majeranowski told an obviously simpatico crowd at the opening plenary, titled “Recycling as Catalyst,” of the event’s third and final day on Thursday. “I also see tangible signs that many of the brands are recognizing that they have to step outside of their comfort zone. Many are talking more about uptake than ever before, which is a great, encouraging sign.”
So far, the EU’s ecodesign for sustainable products regulation, which will include pro-circularity mandates for certain thresholds of recycled content, the use of digital product passports and a ban on destroying unsold consumer goods, has been allowed to continue apace largely unscathed. Fashion companies, he said, seem to be waking up to the fact that securing a future supply of recycled materials is the only way they can meet upcoming legislative demands.
But what the industry also needs to understand, chimed in Patrik Frisk, CEO of materials regeneration firm Reju, is that textile-to-textile recycling, at least at scale, is an entirely new supply chain. It’s creating the infrastructure to reform what has historically been a fragmented and scattershot operation that has favored reuse that is the bigger hurdle, he said, at least relative to the adoption that is going to come.
“In terms of thinking about the gap between waste aggregation and reintroduction into the supply chain and brands, nothing exists, right?” he said. “And in terms of being able to scale, we have to get organized about how we aggregate waste. We have to get organized around how we sort waste, how we prepare waste for recycling or regeneration. And I think that aspect of it is incredibly important. It cannot be overlooked.”
It’s why Reju, two days before, announced that it had linked arms with nearly a dozen other textile companies, including Coleo, Resortecs, Nouvelles Fibres Textiles and the European Spinning Group, to launch the European Circular Textile Coalition, complete with a change-driving” manifesto that seeks to, among other things, make post-consumer textile waste the main feedstock for new textiles. This will involve more than only the likes of Circ and Reju innovating, Frisk said.
“We’ve been very focused on the technology innovation right that sits as the key to unlock this, but the reality is that there’s also a lot of innovation that needs to happen upstream,” he said. “So this is a huge opportunity—a watershed moment—to create all of this efficiency, all of this new business opportunity, create jobs, by making sure that we build this new infrastructure for the future.”
Circ, which is building its first commercial-scale plant in France, too, has rallied together a bunch of allies. Together with Circulose, Syre, Samsara Eco and Sanko’s Re&Up Recycling Technologies, it has coalesced the T2T Alliance to lobby legislators to ensure that the ESPR is fit for purpose. For them, this means including post-industrial waste, which has greater uniformity in terms of its predetermined fiber composition, in recycled content definitions. Relying on post-consumer waste alone will not allow them to ramp up, they say.
Majeranowski said that he thought that figuring out how to tease apart poly-cotton blends and refunnel the purified fibers back into the supply chain was the “hard part.” Turns out, it’s lining up finance, setting up the infrastructure to amass enough textile waste to meet capacity, and having a voice in policy discussions that is the bigger lift.
“So the stuff that used to keep me up at night—technology—is solved,” he said. “Now what keeps me up at night is just making sure we get all these players in the ecosystem together so we can really…get exponential growth.”
Circ made its own announcement earlier in the week, as well: a first-of-its-kind collaboration with H&M Group that will include a women’s V-neck fleece sweatshirt made with Circ polyester and a men’s denim jean derived from Tencel Circ with Refibra technology. Previously, the company had worked with Mara Hoffman and Zara. Earlier this year, it formed a so-called Fiber Club with brands such as Eileen Fisher, Everlane and Zalando and suppliers like Arvind and Birla Cellulose to bring brands together pre-competitively to get over minimum-order quantities and “reduce friction.”
For Frisk, making haste is even more crucial because tackling textile waste will be a “generational effort” that, as hokey as it might sound, must involve both collective action and clear intention to resolve. Reju hopes to build 20 “megafactories,” each one 50 times the size of its 1,000-metric-ton demonstration facility in Frankfurt, by 2034.
“We got ourselves into this mess through generations of not taking care of what we were producing,” he said. “And we know very well how long things take, right? It’s all about coordination, in terms of the execution. And make no mistake, this is going to be a long journey, and for every year we don’t start, we will prolong the process dramatically at the end.”
