Zara owner Inditex, the world’s biggest clothing retailer, has paid €70m (US$74m) to secure a supply of recycled polyester from Los Angeles-based start-up Ambercycle.
Under the offtake deal, Inditex will buy a “significant” portion of Ambercycle’s recycled polyester, which is made from textile waste and sold under the brand Cycora, over three years. The clothing retailer aims for 25% of its fibres to come from “next-generation” materials by 2030.
The Inditex investment will help Ambercycle fund its first commercial-scale textile recycling factory. Production of Cycora at the plant is expected to begin around 2025, and the material will be used in Inditex products over the following three years.
Some apparel brands seeking to reduce their reliance on virgin polyester have switched to recycled polyester derived from plastic bottles, but that practice has come under criticism as it has created more demand for used plastic bottles, pushing up prices.
Innovation
Textile-to-textile polyester recycling is in its infancy and will take time to reach the scale required to service global fashion brands. Javier Losada, chief sustainability officer, Inditex, said: “We want to drive innovation to scale-up new solutions, processes and materials to achieve textile-to-textile recycling.”
The Ambercycle deal marks the latest in a series of investments made by Inditex into textile recycling start-ups. In 2022 it signed a €100m (US$104m) three-year deal to buy 30% of the recycled fibre produced by Finland’s Infinited Fiber Co, and also invested in Circ, another US firm focused on textile-to-textile recycling.
In Spain, Inditex has joined forces with rivals including H&M and Mango in an association to manage clothing waste, as the industry prepares for upcoming European Union legislation that requires member states to separately collect textile waste from January 2025.
Funding
In February 2022, WTiN spoke with Ambercycle when the company received from H&M, Kirkbi, Temasek, Bestseller and Zalando to develop its infrastructure and recycled materials.
Having researched the history of chemical recycling, the founders of Ambercycle and its team of polymer engineering and textile manufacturing experts have now successfully built a chemical recycling system for post-consumer textiles.
To make Cycora, the system begins with intercepting post-consumer textiles before they are shipped to markets overseas for re-use. Once collected, the trims and hardware are removed and then the textiles are shredded and fed into a series of reactors.
Having isolated the polyester, the team further purifies it before it’s then reconstituted into pellets and spun into new fibres and yarns for use in apparel. The process can be infinitely repeated and Ambercycle does everything in-house from waste to fabric rolls. The final Cycora product is of the same quality as petroleum-derived polyester.
Source: https://www.wtin.com/