Materials science startup Ambercycle raises $21.6 million

🔎  What’s going on?

Last week, materials science startup Ambercycle raised $21.6 million from fashion giants such as H&M and Zalando. The funds were raised to scale up production of its first product, Cycora®, a regenerated material.

👗 What does this mean?

Ambercycle closed an oversubscribed Series A funding round, with investors such as H&M CO: LAB, KIRKBI, Temasek, BESTSELLER’s Invest FWD, and Zalando.  They have developed a pioneering molecular separating technology that enables them to recycle post-consumer textile waste back into raw materials. In other words, synthetic textile waste (which is extremely difficult to recycle!) that consumers dispose of, can now be turned back into fibres, yarns and fabrics that can be reused in new clothing.

Let’s explore how the technology works:

1. Post-consumer textile waste is collected (and diverted away from landfills).
2. All hardware such as buttons and zippers are removed.
3. The textiles are shredded and then fed into a series of reactors.
4. The polyester is separated from cellulosic materials (e.g. cotton, viscose, etc), dyes, and any other components. These other components are recovered as pulp at the end of the process.
5. The polyester is further purified and reconstituted into pellets (this is what they call polyester Cycora®).
6. The regenerated cycora® pellets are spun into new fibres and yarns, for use in brand new apparel.

*Source: the above steps are taken directly from Ambercycle’s website.

Their mission statement ‘is to enable an ecosystem of infinite textiles’. Very few waste fabrics are recycled currently, but the ones that are recycled tend to lose the original quality of raw materials. However, Ambercycle's technology recycles textile waste back to the original virgin materials property. There is no decrease in quality, which is why they can claim to enable an ecosystem of ‘infinite textiles’ - it can be reused multiple times, truly.

❓ Why should I care?

Ambercycle’s technology solves two problems: 1) post-consumer textile waste and 2) the need to extract finite resources to make fabrics.

Globally, the fashion industry produces over 92 million tons of waste each year, that’s the equivalent of a rubbish truck full of clothes ending up in landfills every second. Scary! And at the other end of the spectrum, we know that polyester, a synthetic textile, accounts for 51% of textiles produced – that’s 54 million tons. Reducing both wastes at end of life and producing fewer textiles in the first place both play a part in reducing emissions, energy, water and chemicals that go into producing textiles.

When textiles end up at the landfill, it is just left there to break down over time contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. But the problem is synthetic fabrics such as polyester do not break down to the point of being absorbed back into the soil, as they are not made from renewable materials. They break down into microplastics instead. The fashion industry is also one of the major contributors to microplastic pollution.

🚦 Where do we need to be?

Embrace circularity or the circular economy principle as Ambercyle has. The fashion industry is currently on a linear system and needs to move to an entirely circular system. A circular system in fashion looks like using regenerated fibres, yarns and fabrics from waste. This is where waste is designed out from the very start, where the material is reused again and again. If the principle is adopted successfully, then we will see a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, water consumption, waste and pollution from the fashion industry.

👤  What can I do about it?

As an individual, you can:

• Buy only from slow fashion brands such as Patagonia, Mudjeans, Reformation, Pangaia, and Lucy & Yak.
• Keep clothes for as long as possible
• When you dispose of clothes, try to recycle them or take them back to your retailer if they have a take-back scheme.

As a fashion brand, you can:

• Explore using plant-based or regenerative fibres, yarns and fabrics as much as possible.
• Explore business innovations such as resale, renting, repairing and subscription models.
• Encourage shoppers to bring back all clothes to retail outlets at the end of life.

Related: H&M introduces groundbreaking garment recycling in store

Photo by Julissa Santana on Unsplash