Plastic recycling has decreased. only about 9% The total amount of plastic recycled globally seems pretty bad until you compare it to textiles. Only 0.5% of them are recycled.
One of the biggest challenges is that fabric is rarely a single material. Buttons and zippers complicate matters, but spandex is even worse. New synthetic blends have been created for clothes that are a dream to wear but a nightmare to recycle.
“The challenge of recycling is that you can never predict your waste,” Stewart Peña Feliz, co-founder and CEO of Macrocycle, told TechCrunch. “There are an infinite number of pollutants in your waste.”
Macrocycle has developed a shortcut of sorts that promises to make recycled plastic as cheap as virgin material. A startup has created a way to extract desirable synthetic fibers from waste clothing, leaving everything else behind. Macrocycle is a top 20 finalist in Startup Battlefield and is presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.
Peña Feliz knows all too well the potential pitfalls of plastic recycling. Early in his career, he helped run ExxonMobil’s chemical recycling plant, which uses heat to break down plastics into simpler hydrocarbons. It works, but the process is energy intensive and emits a lot of carbon dioxide.
“I saw it firsthand 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 a new way of recycling plastics. “When I saw their technique, I thought it was too good to be true,” Peña Feliz said.
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The pair began turning that technology into a business in the fall of 2022. The following spring, he was selected for a Breakthrough Energy Fellowship to develop it further. “We looked at each other and said, ‘I guess we’ve been doing this the whole time,'” Peña Feliz said. Macrocycle raised a seed round of $6.5 million earlier this year.
To understand plastic recycling, it helps to know a little about the chemistry 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 that they can then reconstruct them into something indistinguishable from virgin plastic.
The macrocycle is different because it does not break down polymers. Instead, it loops the polymer chains back on themselves, forcing them into rings called macrocycles. Those macrocycles are left behind as various solvents wash away the contaminants, which can themselves be recycled. Later, the rings are reopened to reform the polymer chain. “As they open, the rings want to bond with each other, and in polyester, the longer the polymer is exposed, the higher the quality,” Peña Feliz said.
“By not having to repeat all those steps again, we’re able to take a much more energy efficient approach,” he said. MacroCycle’s process uses 80% less energy than that required to make virgin polyester, he said, while other chemical recycling processes use 20% to 30% less energy.
Pena Feliz said the startup is in the process of installing a larger reactor, 2,000 times larger than the one it was using two and a half years ago. It is large enough to produce a 100 kg (220 lb) batch of material for customer samples. The macrocycle is generating revenue from fashion brands interested in the technology, he said.
“We are comfortable being one of the few, if not the only, public chemical recyclers that can claim we can provide this material at price parity after building our first industrial facility,” Feliz Pena said.
He believes this is the only way for recycled plastics to replace fossil fuels in industry. “A lot of innovation happens at the grassroots level, and if you want players like ExxonMobil to change the way they do things, 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 of not adopting this new type of solution is really high.”
If you want to hear firsthand from Macrocycle, and see dozens of additional pitches, participate in valuable workshops, and build relationships that drive business results, To learn more about this year’s disruption, go hereHeld in San Francisco from 27 to 29 October.
