Patrik Frisk was nearly halfway up the elephant when one of his employees expressed doubts about whether it was a terribly good idea to do so.
Frisk is the CEO of Reju, a self-proclaimed “materials regeneration” company that opened its first operating unit in Germany in October, just 12 months after the company hung out its shingle in France.
It was in a sun-drenched East Frankfurt office, a short stroll from the textile-to-textile recycling plant known as Regeneration Hub Zero, that the former Under Armour chief found himself perched gleefully, if also somewhat precariously, on an assemblage of brightly colored clothing shaped to resemble a 3-foot-tall pachyderm.
“You’re part of a new industrial revolution,” Frisk declared before he was asked, most insistently, to dismount. But he had made his point: The surrounding area was once part of a post-World War II boom in polymer research. Now it was time to break new ground again.
The elephant is a physical manifestation of what Reju refers to as the “elephant in the room,” a turn of phrase that has also been used to refer to the 80-200 billion items of apparel that are churned out each year. Not that Frisk isn’t concerned about that, too. He cited a recent Textile Exchange report that found that global fiber production ticked up 7 percent from 116 million metric tons in 2022 to 124 million metric tons in 2023. By most accounts, more than 90 percent of that ends up in a landfill or incinerator.
“If you think about the amount of waste right now, it would be close to over 100 million tons a year,” he added.
But Reju is talking about a different kind of beast.
“The elephant in the room is the fact that without the industry working together, we’re not going to get there,” Frisk said, feet planted back on the carpet. “We like to have the elephant in the room when we have our meetings because we want to make sure that we’re keeping ourselves open to collaboration—because we think it’s really important to realize that this isn’t work that any one company or person can do by themselves.”
Regeneration Hub Zero in Frankfurt, Germany.
What that work involves is taking the world’s growing glut of textile waste and recapturing its fiber content, beginning with polyester, for spinning into new yarn that provides the same performance with better chemistry and—ideally and with the help of brands and suppliers—less microplastic shedding.
By 2034, less than a decade away, it plans to be a $2 billion company, with an estimated 20 “megafactories,” each one 50 times the capacity of Regeneration Hub Zero’s 1,000-metric-ton demonstration format. These will be strategically deployed around the globe, or “wherever the waste is.”
Barn-raising an ecosystem
While splashy names are currency in fashion, Reju has so far swerved any mention of specific brands it intends to work with. Instead, it has inked partnerships with Goodwill and WM in the United States and Cibutex and Nouvelles Fibres Textiles in France to deliver the supply of castoffs it needs to the specifications it desires, though Frisk said that the technology has a higher tolerance for contaminants than most. This is a purely strategic move: The systems that underpin the flow of garments today have been designed to move only in one direction. Reju is going the other way.
“The biggest challenge is that nothing exists, right?” Frisk said. “There is no infrastructure upstream and there is no adoption downstream. And as a consequence, you have to build it. And it’s going to take time.”
Not to mention cost. Every step that’s added to the chain—aggregating materials, sorting for maximum value and then by fiber content, the removal of zippers and hardware—drives up the expense. It stands to reason, then, that textile-to-textile recycled polyester will cost much more than its virgin or bottle-to-textile counterparts.
And yet Frisk said he’s optimistic that “it won’t matter so much,” especially since no one’s going to be making a garment out of 100 percent Reju polyester anytime soon.
“When you look at polyester as an ingredient in a fiber, in a yarn, in a fabric, in a garment, for example, how much it costs in the total value chain is only a few percentage points,” he said. “So when you’re adding a few more percentage points, the impact in the actual end consumer price, even if you were to pass all of that cost on, is actually much lower than people would imagine. And the bigger the brand, the more negligible it would be. So this is much more a question of, ‘Do you really want to do this or not?’”
Though less than 1 percent of old clothing is recycled into new, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, figuring out how to do so isn’t the Holy Grail it used to be. These days, there’s no shortage of cups of the covenant that can dissolve out polyester or cotton from blended fabrics, including Ambercycle from Los Angeles, Re&Up in Turkey and Syre from Frisk’s native Sweden. The trick is beefing up whatever technologies or innovations to commercial scale and, from there, into something that can stand up to the onslaught of cheap and ubiquitous synthetics that make up 64 percent of global fiber production.
But doing so would be no small feat. Despite fashion’s oft-ballyhooed sustainability commitments, the uptake of recycled fibers, including polyester from conventional bottle-to-textile sources, has either stalled or shrunk. With more politically motivated economic turmoil waiting in the wings, a conservative backlash against so-called “woke capitalism” and environmental preachiness gaining intensity and potential regulatory rowbacks on their way, even major brands that appeal to their consumers’ ethics have been less willing to place big bets that broker no immediate payoff—no matter how out of step with the new climate reality as that might be.
Even so, Frisk thinks innovations that home in on post-consumer textiles, like Reju’s, still have a good shot. Legislation that holds brands responsible for the clothing waste they generate, is still gaining traction in California, the European Union and elsewhere, even though the financial incentives that would buoy Reju’s work aren’t happening as quickly as he’d like. Several countries that once provided a pressure release valve, including Indonesia, Rwanda and Uganda, are cracking down on secondhand clothing imports to protect domestic manufacturing and jobs. And there’s a growing awareness that used plastic bottles are better off as grist for a recycling system that was made to keep them circulating rather than commandeered for clothing with a limited lifespan.
Reju, he said, also has at least one competitive advantage: seven decades’ worth of expertise, courtesy of Zimmer Polymer Technologies, one of the “originators of polyester in the world” and the reason Reju picked Frankfurt for its demonstration facility.
“That company, which is now part of what we do, has built over 1,000 polyester plants through the last 40, 50, years,” Frisk said. “Actually, a third of all the polyester production that exists in the world today is built in a plant that we were involved with at some point or another.”
It was Technip Energies that teamed up with IBM and Under Armour to establish a new recycling framework, based on a catalytic chemical process that IBM dubbed VolCat, that would materialize into Reju.
This is also the part where Reju’s lore gets a little more complicated. Zimmer was acquired in 2015 by Technip, a French engineering company that built onshore, offshore and subsea infrastructure for oil and gas extraction. Two years later, Technip merged with FMC Technologies in Houston to form TechnipFMC, which, in turn, spun out Technip Energies in 2021 to focus on the energy and chemicals sectors, including the construction of factories that liquify natural gas and pump out “green” hydrogen.
It was Technip Energies that teamed up with IBM and Under Armour to establish a new recycling framework, based on a catalytic chemical process that IBM dubbed VolCat, that would materialize into Reju. A benefit of VolCat is that it can “renovate” the molecules that create polyester infinitely, Frisk said. Technip Energies is now the sole owner of both Zimmer and Reju.
Coupled with experts in business development—he rattled off a series of names with pedigrees linking them to Dupont, Patagonia, The North Face, Timberland, Carhartt and, of course, Under Armour—Reju has a “wealth of knowledge and capability to integrate into the supply chain and go-to-market” that outstrips most of its rivals, Frisk said.
Reju will also deliver polyester, not a “building block” precursor to polyester that other companies might offer, like bis(2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalate (BHET), terephthalic acid (PTA) or monoethylene glycol (MEG). Regeneration Hub Zero was established to tweak and validate the process of depolymerizing textile waste into BHET, but the white powder is also being repolymerized into PET pellets at an old Zimmer plant next door until the time comes to integrate the operations.
Making polyester this way emits 50 percent fewer carbon emissions than with virgin inputs, according to life-cycle assessments conducted by Deloitte, said Antoni Mairata i Payeras, Reju’s chief technology officer. But he’s also banking on a bigger figure based on the belief that because this is only the start of VolCat’s optimization, claims “can only get better.”
‘Not trying to reinvent the wheel’
Clothing doesn’t get trucked to the demonstration plant, a four-story container-like structure painted with blocks of yellow, pink, coral, teal and cobalt—“the colors of all the textiles we’ve collected,” Frisk said—or, at least, not yet. What’s being hauled in during this testing phase is something called white PET, which resembles popcorn, because it’s the depolymerization portion that’s unique to Reju and what needs to be fine-tuned.
“We only do what we need to do, not more than what we need to do,” Payeras said as he gestured to the front of the building. “When we start increasing to the kilotons that we have in the future, then we’ll also build something that can create this for ourselves.”
Surrounded by miles of piping that bend in every conceivable direction, the gleaming silver reactor at the heart of Regeneration Hub Zero is Reju’s pièce de résistance. Here, heated up to temperatures of up to 250 degrees Celsius (482 degrees Fahrenheit), ethylene glycol and an unnamed volatile catalyst “decompose” the polyester into its constituent monomers, creating a BHET slurry that can be filtered and purified of dyestuffs and other contaminants before it’s cooled, crystallized and dried back into solid form.
But BHET won’t be all that comes out when more mixed ingredients are fed in. Reju is currently seeking partners to help it treat or recapture byproducts that it expects to collect or expel, like elastane, colorants and even polyfluorinated chemicals concealed in certain textile finishes. Cotton is its next priority because it’ll be VolCat’s largest secondary output.
“What we are not trying to do is to reinvent the wheel,” Payeras said. “So if we find someone that can take our waste and revalorize it, then we will partner up. If nobody is able to separate or further process one [stream] or another, then we’ll do it ourselves.”
All this is happening in parallel because while Reju may “have the best technology” for depolymerization, it’s not “pretentious” enough to think it has the best solution for everything else, he added.
“Many people have asked me why Technip is in this business. Why did you create Reju? Why invest in this?” Frisk said back at the office. “And the reason we did that was because we saw that the technology developed by IBM is the fastest, uses less energy and has the highest yield—all the things that make it possible to industrialize this. Other technologies can depolymerize, but the question is how long does it take? How much energy do you need or what kind of yield do you produce? If any of those three are not efficient, it doesn’t matter that you’re able to do it; you’re not going to be able to scale it.”
By 2034, less than a decade away, Reju plans to be a $2 billion company, with an estimated 20 “megafactories” 50 times the size of Regeneration Hub Zero’s 1,000-metric-ton demonstration format.
But “why“ is still a good question. Despite all of this, Technip Energies is still in the business of fossil fuels. It continues to build or expand refineries that transform crude oil into gasoline, diesel and other petrochemicals. Through Zimmer, it remains a market leader in polymer technologies that create products such as virgin polyester. Liquified natural gas, a product of hydraulic fracking, makes up more than half of its annual revenue, which surpassed 6 billion euros ($6.2 billion) in 2023, the most recent year with full financial results.
Technip Energies’ well-lined purse bodes well for Reju because it hasn’t required external funding, an issue that not only proved to be Renewcell’s undoing—at least before it was bailed out of bankruptcy and resurrected as Circulose—but that also continues to bedevil independent innovators scrounging for lines of capital to stay afloat. At the same time, might there be questions about whether there’s a disconnect between what appear to be opposing ambitions?
“No, I don’t think so,” Frisk said. “Because Reju is also going to have to make polyester, right? And when we need to, we need to do that in the same factory that might be making virgin polyester. I don’t think, for a very, very long time going forward, we’re going to be living in a world where virgin polyester isn’t going to exist. It’s just such a big commodity today. And if Technip’s technology for polyester didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be able to turn what we’re making back into polyester.”
Some might see Technip Energies’ efforts as greenwashing in the vein of ExxonMobil’s carbon capture project, which never came to pass, or Chevron’s minor spending on alternative energy initiatives. Others could view it as fighting fire with fire or a company fixing a problem it helped create. Only one thing’s for certain—purveyors of virgin polyester have had 90 years to calibrate the fiber for affordability, efficiency and versatility, as Frisk himself notes. It’s insinuated itself so well into the realm of apparel and textiles that it has become nearly impossible to replace. And for Reju and its fellow upstarts in the textile-to-textile recycled polyester space, that legacy is both a gift and a curse.
Now awaiting B Corp certification, which would make it a “for-benefit” company, Reju has big plans of its own. Frisk believes that, in time, the company could seize a market share of roughly 25 percent of textile-to-textile recycled materials. He envisions its future network of “regeneration hubs” doing the work of collecting and processing unwanted garments independently so waste doesn’t have to be shipped across vast distances, defeating the purpose of trying to curb greenhouse gases. If he had his druthers, there would be 100 of these setups. In the immediate term, Reju plans to establish “megafactories” in the United States and elsewhere in Europe to start cranking out 100,000 metric tons of its polyester by 2027.
“Well, let’s get to 20, first,” he said.
Frisk said that wherever Reju heads, so too will the elephant and the reminder it brings to unite a fragmented industry made up of factions that often toil in isolation and without seeing the bigger picture they could be creating. Ultimately what will accelerate the transition, he said, are capacity and cooperation.
“I think we need to remember that for this to work, we need to connect the dots and we need to actually work together,” Frisk added. “Because if we don’t, the chain is going to remain broken. And my message to the industry is, ‘We‘re in a little bit of a hurry right now to get this thing going.’”
