Synthetico was founded a year ago. It developed a proof of concept which has been shown to brands, including Victoria’s Secret. Currently lab-scale, and working out of Paris, it is now looking to step up to pilot stage.
The company has so far raised €4.2 million in funding, led by Sweden’s EQT Ventures, and a further fundraising round is planned to finance a demo plant to produce 300-500 tonnes a year annually by 2027.
For feedstock, the company is looking mainly to Southeast Asia for post industrial textile waste, but it is also eyeing Europe for post-consumer waste, especially once separate textile waste collections become mandatory in the European Union next year.
Post industrial waste is today the easiest to source, because you’re addressing a pain point in the value chain directly
“When you look at some of the recyclers who have scaled, successfully or unsuccessfully, it’s clear that post industrial waste is today the easiest to source, because you’re addressing a pain point in the value chain directly,” added Bertone.
“Of course, the objective is to build a technology resilient enough to handle post consumer waste, which obviously represents the vast majority of global textile waste, and there’s a lot more of that in Europe.”
If Synthetico is one of the new kids on the block, Looptworks has been around since 2009, initially as an upcycler. However, Scott Hamlin, founder and CEO, told us that the focus was now on recycling pre- and post-consumer waste into high-quality fibres.
The company claims its new 90,000 sq ft facility in Portland, Oregon, is the first of its kind in the US.
We know the textile industry is messy. So we do collection, sorting and deconstruction, and then processing different materials, all under the same roof
“We know the textile industry is messy. So we do collection, sorting and deconstruction, and then processing different materials, all under the same roof,” said Hamlin, another visitor to our booth.
Using a combination of self-developed and third party technology, Looptworks claims its recycled fibres match virgin for both quality and cost, with significant environmental benefits in carbon, water and waste reduction.
“Our green chemistry technology allows us to separate synthetics from natural fibres, and decolour both. We’re just getting started, we’ll be running up to 20 tonnes a day, for the next 12 months, and then going up to about 140 tonnes a day.”
Hamlin says that Looptworks has been able to get to this stage without institutional investors, through its own ability to get finance and also with backing from its angel investors.
“We’ll be profitable by the end of Q2 to Q3 next year. We’ve been profitable as a business. This is a dip into not being profitable during build out and then we’ll return to profitability pretty quickly,” he predicted.
“We’re on par cost wise with virgin fibres, and synthetics are lining up on par for quality too. On the cotton side, you see some degradation, but we’re finding our process is getting significantly longer fibres so we’re getting pretty close to virgin.”
Hamlin says that the company will be commissioning a full lifecycle analysis (LCA) study once the plant is fully operational and he is confident that it will confirm significant impact reductions.
“We’re pretty excited about everything that we’ve done,” he said. “The system has been designed for massive reductions in carbon emissions, water use and waste, so we stack up really nicely against virgin in those three areas.”
