Meet Reju, the Latest Company to Tackle Fashion’s Polyester Problem
Patrik Frisk, CEO of Reju, a Paris-based textile-to-textile recycling firm, saw the elephants as an encouraging sign.
The former Under Armour head was hosting a dinner in Soho House in Manhattan on Wednesday as part of the company’s formal reveal. Outside, on the cobblestone streets of the Meatpacking District, a hundred life-size sculptures of the public art installation “The Great Elephant Migration” stood in various states of graceful repose.
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“You know what the spirit animal of Reju is?” he asked. “It’s the elephant. Because we’re always talking about the elephant in the room.”
Frisk’s elephant is the fact that the fashion industry is “incredibly fragile,” making it a challenge to solve the big problems together. One of those problems happens to be the looming piles of textile waste that, like elephants encountered in close proximity, are difficult to ignore. Much of that waste comprises fossil-fuel-derived polyester, which neither biodegrades nor is easy to recycle on a commercial scale. And the overwhelming majority of recycled polyester used in apparel today is generated from plastic bottles, not from castoff clothing, which is typically downcycled into rags and insulation or, more likely than not, incinerated or landfilled.
Owned by Technip Energies, a French engineering and technology company, Reju has been bouncing around for a couple of years, but it’s kept its work on the down low because Frisk says he doesn’t like to make announcements before things are already in place. With its first operating unit now throwing open its doors in Frankfurt, Germany—a city with a storied history of polymer research and production—Reju is ready to stop shunning the spotlight. Textile management as a whole will be its mandate, he said, but its initial focus will be polyester because it’s the most critical material to address. Of the 124 million metric tons of fiber produced globally last year, 57 percent was polyester, according to Textile Exchange’s latest materials market report.
Polyester is also something it’s already figured out: Reju uses a glycolysis-based technology developed by IBM with the help of Under Armour and Technip Energies. The idea is to strip down polyester in clothing to its monomers, “regenerating it infinitely” for the production of new fibers, Frisk said. Regeneration Hub Zero’s capacity of 1,000 metric tons of fiber every year may sound modest, he said, but it’s only the beginning of the company’s ambitions. Reju plans to open another two “really large” facilities by 2027—one elsewhere in Europe and another in the United States—that can churn out 50,000 metric tons apiece.
Textile-to-textile recycled polyester is one of the final frontiers of material innovation, a landscape made more complicated by the fact that most clothing comprises blended fibers that are near-impossible to disentangle. While the space is getting more crowded with prospectors such as Ambercycle, Eastman, Circ and Syre staking their ground, achieving scale in the face of moderate success has so far remained elusive. Syre’s blueprint facility in North Carolina and now Reju’s own setup are signs of a bigger ramp-up, but headwinds remain nonetheless. Textile waste may seemingly be a boundless resource but securing enough feedstock that meets the desired specifications isn’t easy when logistics is designed to move products in one direction or when sorting is done for style, not fiber. A moribund economy riddled with geopolitical uncertainty doesn’t help elicit the long-term offtake agreements that materials science companies rely on, either. Of 55 innovators surveyed by Sustainabelle Advisory Services in June, just 17 percent said that had offtake agreements locked in. Only 22 percent of brands and 5 percent of suppliers said the same thing.
Frisk said he’s talking to several big brands, which he can’t name at the moment. (It’s these, and not the mills per se, that will be his customers.) And for the most part, he’s feeling upbeat about the prospect of what Reju will be calling Reju polyester, which he says has a 50 percent lower carbon footprint than virgin polyester. There’s the promise of a chain-of-custody system that will enable full transparency of the fiber’s provenance and the potential that extended producer responsibility schemes in Europe and now California will help pay for the necessary infrastructure upgrades. And there’s the hope that sustainability regulation coming down the pipeline will make it more expensive for brands to stick with the status quo.
The plant is in calibration mode, but Frisk expects Reju to start making deliveries next year so that customers can start integrating the material into their supply chains. He said the fact it’s been able to build this in 12 months is “nothing but miraculous.” Already, Frisk is looking to the horizon: Cotton, another output of the recycling process, is something else to tackle. So is microplastic shedding, which can be reduced by bolstering the fiber’s structural integrity, he said.
“The differentiator for us is understanding this entire systemic change that needs to happen in the textile world,” Frisk said. “We’re working with some of the largest waste management companies in the world. We’re working with sorting companies that exist today that are already doing sorting for reuse. We’re also working with the equipment manufacturers because you need to build new equipment. We have staffed up and have the capability and experience in our team to be able to do this.”
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