Plastic recycling has develop into insufficient. Only o 9% of all plastic worldwide is recycled, which sounds good unless you compare it to textiles. Just 0.5% of them are recycled.
One of the biggest challenges is that textiles are rarely one material. Buttons and zippers complicate things, but spandex is even worse. Innovative synthetic blends create clothes that are a dream to wear but a nightmare to recycle.
“The challenge with recycling is that you can never predict the amount of waste,” Stwart Peña Feliz, co-founder and CEO of MacroCycle, told TechCrunch. “Your waste contains an infinite number of pollutants.”
MacroCycle has developed a shortcut of sorts that guarantees to make recycled plastic as inexpensive as virgin material. The startup has come up with a way to extract desirable synthetic fibers from textile waste, leaving every part else behind. MacroCycle was among 20 finalists in the Startup Battlefield competition and is presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.
Peña Feliz knows well the potential pitfalls of recycling plastics. Early in his profession, he helped run the ExxonMobil chemical recycling facility, which uses heat to break down plastics into simpler hydrocarbons. It works, but the process is energy-intensive and releases a lot of carbon dioxide.
“I saw it with my own eyes and knew something had to be done,” he said.
Shortly after leaving Exxon, Peña Feliz decided to pursue an MBA at MIT. There he met Jan-Georg Rosenboom, who, as a postdoc, had developed an progressive approach to recycling plastics. “When I saw his technology, I thought it was too good to be true,” Peña Feliz said.
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The two began turning the technology into a business in the fall of 2022. The following spring, they were chosen for a Breakthrough Energy Fellowship to further develop it. “We looked at each other and said, ‘I think we’re going to do this full time,’” Peña Feliz said. Earlier this yr, MacroCycle raised a $6.5 million seed round.
To understand plastic recycling, it is price understanding the chemical composition of the material. Plastics are polymers, which are long chains of monomers or repeating chemical building blocks. Most chemical recycling processes break down plastic polymers into smaller components, including monomers, so they will then be rebuilt into something indistinguishable from virgin plastic.
MacroCycle is different in that it does not break down polymers. Instead, it loops the polymer chains back, forcing them into rings called macrocycles. These macrocycles are left behind as various solvents wash away contaminants that may themselves be recycled. Later, the rings are reopened to reform the polymer chain. “As you open the rings, they want to connect to each other, and in the case of polyester, the longer the polymer, the higher the quality,” Peña Feliz said.
“Without having to repeat all these steps again, we are able to take a much more energy-efficient approach,” he added. The MacroCycle process uses 80% less energy than needed to make virgin polyester, while other chemical recycling processes use 20% to 30% less, he said.
The startup is in the means of establishing a larger reactor, 2,000 times larger than the one they used two and a half years ago, Peña Feliz said. It is large enough to produce 100-kilogram (220-pound) batches of fabric that customers can sample. MacroCycle generates revenue from fashion brands interested in the technology, he said.
“We feel comfortable being one of the few, if not the only, public chemical recycler that can claim that once our first industrial facility is built, it will be able to supply this material at price parity,” said Feliz Peña.
He is convinced that this is the only way recycled plastics can replace fossil fuels in the industry. “Bottom line drives a lot of innovation, and if you want players like ExxonMobil to change the way they operate, it’s not going to happen from within,” he said. “I want to be able to create a technology that is so economically attractive that the opportunity cost would be really high if the company didn’t adopt this new type of solution.”