Peter Majeranowski and Conor Hartman of Circ have developed better technology for textile recycling, which solves complex conventional recycling techniques. They’ve raised $8 million from Patagonia, Japanese conglomerate Marubeni, Alante Capital, and Card Sound Capital to put the technology to work in textiles that will debut later this year.
Most textile recyclers today can only recycle and recover one material. That means your polyester-cotton blend T-shirt may be recycled, but only one of the two materials will be salvageable to use again. Then there’s the question of whether or not that fiber will be strong enough to use on its own entirely?
Or does it need to be blended with virgin fibers to keep it going?
Consulting with researchers, the CEO of Circ learned that a similar hydrothermal processing system could be used in textile recycling. The cotton-polyester combo, Hartman says, is “like looking at plants. Cotton is the cellulose, and polyester is the lignin.”
Therefore, to solve this issue, Circ uses chemical recycling, a term that troubles Majeranowski. As environmentalists, they’re not crazy about what “chemicals” suggest, but he assures it’s “responsible chemistry.” The startup hopes to make a severe dent in the massive global consumption of textiles over the next decade. “A lot of garments are produced globally per annum.
It is somewhere in the ballpark of 100 billion garments. This startup hopes that it could have the ability to recycle 10 percent of that or 10 billion garments, by 2030.
Peter Majeranowski said, “Using recycled PET as in plastic bottles prolongs use by one to two years. It’s not a great solution. It’s better than putting it in the landfill immediately. But now, with this technology, it can go from a bottle to board short to a board short again.
The Green Machine is a circular solution for the polyester fraction. Still, as we understand it, the cotton is recovered only as a cellulose powder that goes into other secondary non-textile applications as a byproduct. They recently announced that they will figure out how to make that cellulose powder into a textile material, but I don’t believe that it’s happened yet. It’s important to note just how big the textile market is. If all the chemical recycling technologies out there were fully scaled and had 10 major factories, we’d still never touch elbows due to the significant size of the total addressable market.
We are talking about 50 million tons per year for polyester for clothing, 26 million tons per year of cotton, and 150 million trees of pulp per year for cellulosic fibers.”
