The sportswear Goliath isn’t a stranger to textile-to-textile recycling. This past year, for instance, Nike’s in-house initiative collected more than 135 tons of polyester scrap and items such as laces for reincorporation.
But its multi-year—and otherwise unspecified—agreement with Syre, the Swedish “circular” polyester manufacturer backed by H&M Group, signals a notable uptick in ambition at a time when fears of a “sustainability retreat,” including by Nike itself, have been swirling because of the economic anxiety that has the business world in a death grip. This wasn’t a decision that was taken lightly, said Jad Finck, Syre’s chief commercial officer: the deal has been “north of” two years in the making, placing initial conversations at the material innovator’s inception.
This is “bold leadership,” the former Allbirds executive said of Nike, which has tapped Syre as its “lead” strategic supplier for textile-to-textile recycled polyester.
“They’re partnering with a business, not just a technology,” Finck said. “And so, of course, they want to deep dive into the technology and the products, but they’ve also got to understand the sustainability aspects, the life-cycle analysis, the feedstock plan, the investor syndicate of who’s backing us, who’s the management. So I think really getting to know the company and seeing it progress over the course of many months and quarters was critical to having a feeling solid enough to make this a big, multi-year commitment.”
There’s also the fact that Syre is on the cusp of hitting commercial scale. It’s in the middle of constructing a 10,000-metric-ton blueprint plant in Cedar Creek in North Carolina, the birthplace of its technology. “All eyes,” Finck said, are likewise on Vietnam, where it plans to raise a $700 million-$1 billion “gigascale” factory, beginning in 2027, that’s capable of churning out up to 250,000 metric tons of PET chips for spinning into yarn.
Finck is confident that Syre and the Vietnamese government will be able to work something out regarding the Southeast Asian nation’s current ban on used clothing imports. Without a direct line to overseas feedstocks, the plant will only be able to amass 10 percent of the 300,000-plus metric tons of post-consumer material it will need to keep its machines humming.
Writing in a statement, Sitora Muzafarova, the Swoosh’s vice president of materials supply chain, said its partnership with Syre represents “a shift in our materials strategy and how we source.” Nike employed nearly 183,620 metric tons of polyester, its most used material, in 2024, according to its latest sustainability data report. While some 63 percent of that was derived from recycled sources, the vast majority stemmed from plastic bottles that have been framed as a circularity dead end better off left in the bottling ecosystem.
“Innovation is at the heart of Nike’s DNA and textile-to-textile recycled polyester is essential in our ambition to design and produce breakthrough products that both perform to the highest standards that our athletes expect and are more sustainable at the same time,” Muzafarova said.
Legislation is almost certainly creating an impetus as well. The European Union’s ecodesign for sustainable products regulation, which could mandate minimum requirements for recycled content, has so far skirted efforts by conservative interests to cut through what they say is overly burdensome red tape. The concept of an extended producer responsibility scheme for textiles, which would require apparel and footwear producers to manage and finance their merchandise’s end of life, is also gaining traction in different parts of the world, including Nike’s native Oregon.
In an industry where pilot and one-off capsule collections abound, however, Nike’s commitment is a sign that the Air Jordan maker is “in it for the long haul,” Finck said.
“I think when they lead like this, many people follow, and so we’re excited to see the effect of this,” he said of the buoyant effect the partnership could have, not only for Syre but for material innovation at large. Consumers, he added, don’t buy sustainable products. They buy “great” ones. What companies like his can do is give brands the high-quality materials—that also happen to be sustainable—so they can make the “no-compromise” products that will drive the “great textile shift.”
“Polyester has typically been widely available, right?” Finck said. “But now, in order to accelerate where we all know we need to go, which is circular materials that end reliance on landfills, we need something that can be infinitely regenerated back to the quality that the designers need to make the great products that people love. We don’t want to have limitations. We want to let designers run as fast as they can. We want to let athletes run as fast as they can.”
Still, both parties appear to be hedging their bets. On Monday, Loop Industries, a Montreal-based company, announced its own multi-year offtake agreement that will see it supply Nike with its Twist product, a circular polyester resin made from textile waste. Syre, for its part, revealed in June that it was onboarding Gap Inc., Houdini and Target as strategic partners to “play a critical role” in “bringing circular polyester to the broader market, accelerating adoption and shaping the future of the textile industry” as it prepares to emerge from the wings. If the financial travails of Renewcell, another Swedish textile-to-textile recycler that received significant corporate buy-ins before declaring bankruptcy last year, continue to cast a long shadow, however, Finck didn’t say.
Having Nike on its side, nevertheless, is a massive get for Syre. It hopes to manifest a network of 12 giga-factories worldwide that could collectively pump out more than 3 million metric tons of circular polyester within the next decade, helping close what BCG, Quantis and Textile Exchange have deemed a 133 million-ton preferred raw materials “gap” by 2030.
“As suppliers, we need to build new factories, and factories need long-term commitments from big buyers to get built, so this is an advanced market commitment,” Finck said. “It’s the kind of thing that can enable financing of these large plants that we know we need to build.”
Nike and Syre are taking things slow, with what they say is a “step-by-step” integration of the latter’s circular polyester into core Nike performance lines, with the first products made available within the next few years. This is also the tack that Ambercycle, a Los Angeles-headquartered maker of “molecularly regenerated” polyester, also made from castoff clothing, said it would be taking with REI Co-op late last month. Conditions may be chaotic right now, Finck said, but fashion purveyors are starting to think about what happens after the market turbulence subsides.
“They know they’re going to need versatile, high-quality, sustainable fiber,” he said. “They know they’re going to have to essentially future-proof their supply chains. So they know that every step in this direction is going to set them up well in the future for continued supply, for not having to worry about being allowed to play in the new marketplace or being held back by regulations or penalties or missed incentives.”
And there’s a sports metaphor in there, too, which Nike might appreciate.
“They know that this is what gets you in the game and keeps you on the field,” Finck added.
Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/