Puma Wants to Transition to Textile-to-Textile Recycled Polyester. It Won’t Be Easy.
Puma wants a significant amount of its polyester to hail from textile-to-textile recycled sources by 2030.
The exact percentage will be revealed at a later date, but it’s enough to say that it will be in the double digits. As far as decisions go, it’s a bold one: This is on top of a pledge by the sportswear giant to scale its use of recycled polyester to 75 percent by 2025. (It accomplished 62 percent in 2022.) The only trouble is that more than 99 percent of recycled polyester today stems from bottle-to-textile recycling, according to Textile Exchange’s most recent materials market report.
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“It’s a bit of a stretch goal,” said Howard Williams, director of global innovations, apparel and accessories at Puma. “But, you know, we like a challenge.”
While Puma hasn’t figured out how to turn castoff clothing into new materials at the scale it desires quite yet, it’s making measurable strides. Early this month, the German firm announced that it had managed to create millions of replica football jerseys, including those for the Euro and Copa América tournaments, from a minimum of 75 percent recycled textile waste. The rest was derived from bottles made from polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, a feedstock it wants to eventually phase out for reasons of future availability and long-term sustainability.
Not only do old plastic bottles provide better grist for the production of new plastic bottles—a fact that the soda industry is increasingly keen to take advantage of—but the fashion industry also needs to wrestle with its own leviathan end-of-life problem. Puma began building out its Re:Fibre program in 2019, in fact, after its soccer division business unit wished out loud for a way to collect players’ uniforms at the end of the season for transforming into the next season’s kit. In recent years, legislative pushes for extended producer responsibility for textiles, not to mention regulatory crackdowns on unsubstantiated green claims, have made a transition from bottle-to-textile recycling a mission-critical move.
Williams had seen chemical recycling in China, so he thought it was an idea worth exploring. Because China doesn’t allow the importation of waste, which “kind of closed that avenue off,” Puma began hunting for chemical recyclers in Europe. This proved to be an onerous undertaking. With no Ambercycle, Carbios, Circ, Eastman, Green Machine, Re&Up or Syre to speak of—at least, in any meaningful form—the brand had to build an entire venture from the ground up.
“We were the first, certainly in Europe, to explore this,” Williams said.
Re:Fibre’s beginnings were modest, to say the least. Its first bet on a lab in Spain five years ago churned out just four kilograms of recycled fiber using a process called glycolysis: the process of using ethylene glycol and high temperatures to target and break down polyester in shredded clothing into its monomer constituents. Stripped of dyes and other additives, these monomers can then be reconstituted into PET chips and melted and extruded to form new polyester fibers.
Puma identified other business partners across Europe and then Asia, creating a network of producers that has allowed it to remain agile and minimize risk in a way that erecting a purpose-built factory wouldn’t have. Right now, it’s pumping out an annual 400 metric tons of fiber out of Asia and 100 metric tons from Turkey, which can only take it so far without supplementing with bottle-to-textile recycling or blending with other materials.
Which is also why the Adidas rival has its eye on bringing Re:Fibre to the United States next, preferably close to its regional production sites in Brazil and Mexico. Puma wants to get its production numbers up as well as extend the program’s market share. Collaborating with local partners is more cost-effective than “shipping everything all around the world to one location,” as most companies try to do, Williams said. Plus, it’s less polluting.
“If you take feedstock from garment factories, that’s predominantly in Asia,” he said. “If you take feedstock from take-back schemes or industrial clothing, uniforms and things, that’s in Europe and America, and they’re a little bit too far apart to combine together. So we’re trying to look for regional solutions in each market where we can take advantage of both.”
Reaching economies of scale
Despite the preponderance of textile waste, securing it is harder than it looks. For one thing, supply chain logistics haven’t been set up that way. For another, Puma needs polyester-heavy garments to make the economics work. The less polyester that’s present in a blend, the lower the yield. Ideally, a garment should contain 95 percent of the stuff, though 80-20 or 75-25 splits are more common.
Post-consumer clothing from take-back bins, however, can—quite literally—be a mixed bag, whether in terms of quality or composition. They also frequently require the labor-intensive removal of buttons, zippers and other extraneous components. At the same time, the most desirable items—unwanted jerseys from Puma-sponsored soccer clubs like AC Milan and Manchester City—rarely generate the volumes needed to get machines started, let alone running.
“Feedstock security is one of the key things that we’re trying to come to terms with,” Williams said. “It’s a challenge. We haven’t got the answer yet and I think many other brands are in a simple situation because we have these aspirations of recycling more and more, but to do that, we need capacity in the recycling companies. And for the recycling companies to have capacity, they need a steady flow of feedstock. So it’s almost like chicken and egg.”
There are rich veins to tap still, however, such as polyester-based work uniforms, restaurant tablecloths and hotel linens, all of which are relatively homogenous content-wise and have frequent turnover rates. The trick is locking down those sources first before anyone else. Already McKinsey & Co. anticipates that if all brands with public recycled-content commitments fulfill their promises, the demand for rPET will outstrip supply by roughly three times in the United States alone by 2030, less than six years away.
For Stefan Seidel, Puma’s senior director of corporate sustainability, however, the question of supply might be an issue that is bigger than one company and requires “finding some friends.”
“I think we have to do this together with our industry peers, so that we can get the economies of scale,” he added.
That Re:Fibre is described as an initiative, rather than a technology, is on purpose. Ramping up its capacity requires diversification, Williams said, so it’s almost technique-agnostic. This is especially important because even the most promising solutions are still fairly nascent. Carbios, with which Puma, On, Patagonia and Salomon signed an agreement to help it hone its polyester-targeting enzymatic system in 2022, for instance, won’t hit commercial scale until mid-2026, while Montreal’s Loop Industries, another potential partner, is looking to break ground on a PET recycling plant in South Korea at the end of 2025.
But the overall outlook is promising. Besides Ambercycle in Los Angeles, Circ in Virginia and Sixone in Vancouver, Puma is in regular contact with Eastman, which said in March that it has achieved on-spec initial production at its new “polyester renewal” facility in Tennessee. Other contenders are also coming online every day, creating competition that can make pricing more favorable for brands like Puma, though this could also mean that not all of them survive.
Cost casts a long shadow, particularly during a time of ongoing geopolitical turmoil and economic uncertainty. That goes for both brands and their customers.
“The ideal is that sustainable solutions need to be as close to cost-neutral as possible, otherwise they’ll never work and never replace the linear mode,” Williams said. He remembered one upstart asking Puma to shell out $40 per kilogram, adding that “we can get cashmere for that price.”
One thing’s for sure: From a technical point of view, “all these things are possible,” Williams said. The biggest hurdles are cost, capacity and the ability to optimize processes for each region. Nip these in the bud and Puma’s moon shot will start looking more down to earth.
“We keep our eyes and ears close to the ground, seeing who’s doing what, where and when,” he said. “We’re learning as we go.”
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