How Reju is Rebuilding Fashion Systems for Circularity

For years, the fashion industry has been recycling waste plastics—such as PET bottles—into new polyester. Although this tackled one waste stream, it left another untouched, with a dearth of readily available options for end-of-life synthetic textiles.

Reju is working to fill in this gap. The Technip Energies-owned textile regeneration firm is leveraging technology originally developed by IBM to transform used polyester into new textiles. Its molecular-level recycling solution can recirculate polyester indefinitely, allowing textiles to have multiple lives instead of becoming waste. “We wanted to address…the largest problem in terms of waste. And that actually is not bottles; it is textile waste,” Reju’s CEO Patrik Frisk told Jasmin Malik Chua, sourcing and labor editor at Sourcing Journal, during a recent fireside chat.

Compared to virgin polyester, Reju’s materials have a 50 percent lower carbon footprint. The resulting material is purer than mechanically recycled polyester, and during the recycling process, the polyester is given a performance boost for better durability and tenacity and lower shedding.

Although Reju is just a year and a half old, its team of textile industry and engineering veterans—including Frisk, who was previously CEO at Under Armour—contribute a collective expertise that has supported its growth and speedy development. With a focus on industrialization, Reju is looking to scale to a $2 billion company by 2034. Following the opening of its first operational plant—dubbed Regeneration HubZero—in Frankfurt this past October with an annual capacity of 1,000 metric tons, it plans to open more hubs around the globe with more capacity to meet the demand for circular polyester.

Reju has adopted an elephant as its mascot, using it as a symbol that represents the “elephants in the room,” one of which is the fragmentation that hinders circular progress. Combatting this, the company is building systems with partners including Goodwill to connect the dots between textile collection, sortation and reuse.

“Almost all textile today is being sorted for the way it looks or the way it could be reused—which is also, of course, very, very important—but our business is about making sure that we’re understanding the fiber content, and that is a whole new infrastructure that needs to be built, a whole new supply chain,” said Frisk.

Watch the video to discover Reju’s future plans and how it is working to close the industry’s circularity gaps.

Join Sourcing Journal at our Sustainability Summit on March 19 to hear more from Reju.