Plastic recycling is down. Just about 9% All plastics are recycled globally, which sounds good until you compare it to textiles. Only 0.5% from that recycling.
One of the biggest challenges is that textiles are rarely one material. Buttons and zippers solve the problem, but spandex is worse. A novel synthetic blend made for clothes that are dreamy to wear but dreamy to recycle.
“The challenge with recycling is that you can’t predict your waste,” Stewart Peña Feliz, Resident and CEO Macrocycletold techcrunch. “Your waste has no limits of contamination.”
Macrocycle has developed a shortcut, of sorts, promising to make recycled plastic as cheap as virgin material. A startup has invented a way to extract synthetic fibers from waste textiles, leaving everything else behind. Macrocycle is the Top 20 in Battle Starup and display TechCrunch is annoying in San Francisco.
Peña feliz knows the potential of plastic recycling very well. Earlier in his career, he helped run a chemical recycling plant, which uses heat to break down plastic into simpler hydrocarbons. It works, but the process is energy intensive and specs a lot of carbon dioxide.
“I saw that firsthand and knew something had to be done,” he said.
Shortly after he left Exxon, Peña Feliz decided to pursue an MBA and MIT. There, he met Jan-Georg Rosenboom, who was a postdoc developing a novel method of recycling plastic. “When I saw the pressure, I felt very happy,” Peña Feliz said.
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The couple began turning the technology into a business in the fall of 2022. The following spring, they were selected for a breakthrough energy fellowship to further develop it. “We looked at each other and said, ‘I think we’re doing this full time,'” Peña Feliz said. Macrocycle raised a $6.5 million seed round earlier this year.
To understand plastic recycling, it is important to understand the chemistry of the material. Plastics are polymers, which are long stretches of monomers, or repeating chemical building blocks. Most chemical recycling processes can break the plastic polymer down into its smaller components, including monomers, thereby rebuilding it into something indistinguishable from virgin plastic.
Macrocycle differs in that it does not eliminate polymers. However, the loops of the polymer chains return to themselves, forcing them to form rings called macrocycles. The macrocycles remain behind as various solvents wash away the contaminants, which can be recycled. Later, the ring opens again to repair the polymer chain. “When opening the rings want to join each other, and in polyester, the longer the polymer, the higher the quality,” Peña Feliz.
“By not having to go back all these steps, we can take a more energy efficient approach,” he said. The Macrocycle process uses 80% less energy than needed to make Virgin Polyester, while other chemical recycling processes use 20% to 30% less, he said.
The startup is in the process of setting up a larger reactor, one much larger than the one it used two and a half years ago, Peña Feliz said. Large enough to produce 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of material for customers to sample. Macrocycle generates revenue from fashion brands interested in the technology, he said.
“We are pleased to be one of, if not the only, general chemical recycler that can claim that we can provide industrial parity once we build our first industrial facility,” said Feliz Peña.
He believes that the only way for recycled plastics to replace fossil fuels in industry. “The bottom line is bringing a lot of innovation, and if you want to have a player like ExxonMobil change the way they do things, it’s not going to happen from within,” he said. “I want to be able to make the technology better if the opportunity cost is too high for them not to adopt this new type of solution.”
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