Michelin Is Helping Turn Old Activewear Into New Nylon

With Michelin, Lululemon, and Victoria’s Secret among its backers, Syntetica has raised $30 million to scale a process that recycles blended nylon in leggings and swimwear the industry could never reuse.

Recycled nylon has a scale problem, and France’s Syntetica has raised $30 million to crack the hardest part of it. The Paris startup closed a Series A in July led by the Ecotechnologies 2 fund, which Bpifrance manages for the French government, with the activewear brand Lululemon and the Sri Lankan manufacturing giant MAS Holdings both putting money in.

Syntetica says it can recycle the kind of nylon the industry had all but given up on, the blended, mixed-fiber sort inside leggings, swimsuits, and lingerie. That is the part that has never worked. Nylon is a petroleum-derived synthetic, and manufacturers almost never use it straight, cutting it with elastane, cotton, or polyester to get the stretch and drape a garment needs, and those blends don’t work with conventional recycling systems. Recycled nylon still makes up only about 2 percent of the roughly 7 million tons produced every year, while post-consumer textiles pile up to nearly 80 percent of all textile waste. Blended nylon has essentially been a dead end. Brands have leaned on virgin, petroleum-based nylon because it is cheap and reliable, and the recycled version that does exist has mostly come from tidy industrial scraps rather than the clothes people actually wear and send back.

“For decades, mixed nylon waste has been considered too complex and too expensive to recycle at scale,” Marco Bertone, Syntetica’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “We have shown that it is possible to recover high-value materials from the waste streams the industry has historically written off. This funding allows us to move from breakthrough chemistry to industrial reality and accelerate the transition to more circular materials…

Source: ethos