Rachel Kitchin, senior corporate climate campaigner at environmental campaign non-profit Stand Earth, is excited by the deal between Nike and Syre, and others of its kind. Its annual Fossil-Free Fashion Scorecard, which ranks global fashion companies on their efforts to phase out fossil fuels, puts a 20% score weighting on low-carbon and longer lasting materials, which includes textile-to-textile recycled materials.
“We’ve been calling for significant investment in textile-to-textile industries, and this is pretty big news in moving true circularity forward because it’s going to take significant investment and scaling to make it feasible,” Kitchin says.
Syre is aiming to scale gradually, reaching a metric ton capacity of between 100,000 and 250,000 at its Vietnam plant. French company Reju, owned by energy company Technip Energies, is another that launched with built-in scale. Reju’s next plant, located in the Netherlands, will recycle the equivalent of 300 million items annually (the company is focusing only on post-consumer textiles) resulting in 50,000 tons of raw material, which can then be repolymerized and turned into regenerated polyester, according to the company.
Reju and Syre are working at previously unreached scales, but the figures are still a drop in the ocean compared to the 78 million tons of polyester being produced each year. “Even in the best of scenarios, 10 years out, and my competitors and myself all build exactly what we said we would, we’ll be making something like eight or nine million tons [of recycled polyester] in a world that [will be] producing 100 million-plus tons [of virgin]. So, we’re not even going to be having an impact of more than maybe a few percentage points,” says Frisk.
Photo: Courtesy of Reju
Growth cannot go unchecked
Recycled polyester production increased by 400,000 tons between 2023 and 2024, but its market share decreased by 0.5 percentage points due a simultaneous increase in virgin polyester production. “The production of virgin fossil-based polyester is the biggest issue today,” says Textile Exchange’s Jensen. “The volume question deserves the most focus within that category specifically.”