Textile recycling company Reju offers a chemical solution to textile waste

The pace of fast fashion is quickening. Trend cycles have only shortened since the pandemic, which means consumers are buying clothes more frequently, incentivizing retailers to produce copious garments, more than half of which are made from polyester.

Once clothing items are no longer en vogue, they might be sold on resale platforms, donated to secondhand stores, or repurposed into cleaning rags—but that’s the best-case scenario. Mostly, the nearly 100 million tons of annual global textile waste go into landfills or are burned.

Reju, a polyester recycling company, offers a unique alternative: It repurposes polyester, a synthetic material made from petroleum that can take up to 200 years to disintegrate, by breaking it down to its molecular components and then rebuilding it into a stronger, better-quality fiber, ready to be made into completely new garments. One material scientist told Morning Brew that Reju’s method is the “holy grail” of the circular economy, and an industry expert said the company is proof that investors are ready to support sustainable textile innovation to tackle the global waste crisis.

And the crisis only stands to worsen: One estimate posits that the world will produce 134 million tons of textile waste annually by 2030, and more polyester will be manufactured to keep up with the industry’s cadence.

Down to the studs

Reju sees opportunity in this quandary. At its Regeneration Hub Zero in Frankfurt, Germany, Reju takes textile waste destined to be burned or tossed in a landfill and uses it as feedstock for its polyester recycling process. First, polyester is extracted from the textile waste, then de-polymerized, or broken down to monomers.

“It’s like if you had a bike chain, you cut all the links, and you have now a bunch of links, but they’re not connected anymore. They’re just molecules,” Reju CEO Patrik Frisk explained.

Reju’s chemical recycling process relies on glycolysis, which uses a liquid called ethylene glycol to break the bonds between polyester molecules. Once the polyester has been separated into molecules, Reju cleans it of additives, colors, and bacteria before re-polymerizing it—reconnecting all the links into a chain—and turning it back into clean polyester.

“The idea here is to take this mixed post-consumer textile,” Frisk told Morning Brew, “extract the polyester, cleanse it of any impurities, de-polymerize it…then re-polymerize it and make new yarns and fabrics at a higher quality than what you got coming in. So now that you put it back into circulation again, you’re making a better product out of it.”

Scaling up

Reju can de-polymerize and re-polymerize at scale because of its catalyst, which is a component added to the chemical reaction that speeds it up. The catalyst can be reused many times without deactivating. Frisk said the catalyst allows Reju to recycle polyester efficiently and quickly, allowing for a larger impact.

“[We are] able to do it quickly with as little energy as possible to get as high yield as possible, which also then plays back into the environmental aspect of carbon emissions,” Frisk said, adding that Reju uses 50% less carbon than “taking oil out of the ground and making polyester out of it.”

What separates Reju from other textile and polyester recycling companies is that its process uses both mechanical and chemical recycling and does so using less energy than competitors, CTO Antoni Mairata said. In general, textile recyclers that rely only on mechanical processes are more sustainable than their chemical recycling counterparts. But using the catalyst, Reju’s chemical recycling needs less energy to function.

“The energy you cannot change. It is intrinsic to the chemistry, to the process. What you can change is the speed at which that happens,” Mairata told Morning Brew. “And this is what the catalyst is doing. This is why our technology has an advantage. It takes minutes for the reaction to be over.”

Michael Bockstaller, a chemist and materials science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told Morning Brew that Reju seems to be achieving that goal, and that the company’s work is “very promising.”

“De-polymerization [is] the holy grail in polymer recycling,” Bockstaller said. “This is going to be the critical step in the circular economy if we want to make this a reality as far as polymers are concerned. I’m happy to see this progress.”

Going stateside

Reju is working with Goodwill and waste management companies to acquire feedstock, and after repurposing polyester fibers, Reju sells its textiles to retailers and brands, including car and furniture companies and airlines, which benefit from using recycled fabrics when complying with extended producer responsibility regulations. Reju said it couldn’t yet comment on brand partnerships or expected output.

Reju plans to construct its regeneration plants primarily in the largest producers of textile waste—the US and Europe—and recently announced plans to build its first US site in Rochester, New York. The plant will be New York state’s first big shot at textile innovation and bring new industry jobs, too, Ali Schachtschneider, a textile innovation consultant with a background in sustainable biomaterials, told Morning Brew.

“I’m a fan of any material innovation that really moves toward scale,” Schachtschneider said. “So this is a good indicator that Reju has the financing and the backing that they need to move the needle in a good direction.”

Reju’s progress is also a positive indication for the entire textile innovation industry, according to Schachtschneider.

“There’s also a number of other companies that are doing really cool things directly in the polyester space,” she said. “So I’m happy about what this announcement of Reju’s plant does for making the investors of these other companies have a little bit more faith that they’ll get to scale eventually.”