Syre Exec Says It’s ‘Inflection Point Time’ for Textile Circularity
Conventional recycled polyester—the stuff made from melted down plastic bottles—is akin to reheated leftovers, according to Syre chief commercial officer Jad Finck. The taste is sub-par, and it oftens ends up in the trash.
“As we know when you reheat something, kind of like…microwaving your lunch, it gets worse every time,” he said. “There’s a need—a very, very big need—to truly regenerate the difficult to recycle materials out there. And we’re starting with polyester.”
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The Stockholm-based textile-to-textile recycling venture has generated buzz in recent months, rising from the rubble of now-defunct Renewcell, the once-promising innovator that many industry insiders believed would revolutionize the sourcing of sustainable materials. Syre, like its predecessor in the space, reclaims polyester from textiles of all kinds, including poly-blends, regenerating the content into a pure polyester that can be used to create new fibers and yarns.
Finck, an ex-Allbirds executive, joined the firm just four months ago, around the time Syre made its market debut and announced the signing of a $100 million Series A funding round.
He said that while recycled polyester—the plastic bottle variety—has become “table stakes” across the industry, it’s not truly circular. That’s because the resulting material is a “downgrade” from its origin source, lacking in the same structural integrity and longevity of virgin polyester. In other words, clothes made from plastic waste end up languishing in landfills just like any other discarded garment from a shopper’s wardrobe.
But chemical-process-driven textile-to-textile recycling could be the “unlock” the industry needs to finally rid itself of its dependence on fossil-fuel-derived synthetics—and the industry is buying in.
“We don’t think of ourselves as a startup. We might be new in a sense, but we really think of us as a scale up, and that’s because the technology that it’s built on, this chemical recycling, textile-to-textile recycling, has actually been developed over a decade,” Finck said. “This is the inflection point time, where this technology is ready. It’s not just a future technology, but it’s time to truly regenerate plastic, because we need to go textile-to-textile, we need to be circular.”
Syre, like Renewcell before it, has the backing of global fashion giant H&M, which has promised to buy $600 million-worth of recycled polyester over the course of seven years. Not just an investor, but a client, Finck said such arrangements and offtake agreements are “critical” the building the momentum needed to get next-generation materials out of the startup stage and into the mainstream.
“It’s chicken and egg, right? In order to build these plants, these are huge investments, and you don’t want to do it on spec. You don’t want to do it business strategy based on hope,” Finck said. Syre sees its recycled polyester replacing 40 percent of the fiber used across the entire textile sector, he claimed. “To do that, you’ve got to have these foundational offtakes, and you’ve got to build huge plants. And to do that, there needs to be commitment.”
Those are big ambitions, but Finck believes that scaling quickly and creating economies of scale will be key to spurring adoption.
When it comes to innovative new materials, Finck said, “I’ve been there when it’s been successful and it’s moved from innovation to in-line, and I’ve been there when it’s kind of hit a brick wall.” A material needs to be in high supply, readily available and priced right in order for a true replacement of conventional options to take place. Too often, design teams have run into limitations when it comes to material availability and performance, hemming them in and leading them to design limited runs and capsule collections.
Finck said Syre has tried to examine adoption from a brand perspective. When it comes to next-gen materials, innovators must ask themselves, “What are the limitations? Why wouldn’t they use it?”
No doubt pulling from his experience at Allbirds, which has aimed to replace almost all conventional footwear inputs with earth-friendly options, Finck offered advice to material innovators. “Don’t make [brands] destroy their margin just to feel good about the planet. This is a business. Give them something they can be successful with, and if not, go back to the drawing board.”
“I think that’s a critical unlock,” he added. “We need to put some wins on the board, but we need to make it something that’s rational for brands to say yes to.”
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