- When you think about plastic waste,
you don't often think about what's inside your closet.
The development of the synthetic
materials that make our
modern clothing more functional, stretchier
and cheaper means that there's actually more plastic waste
in our clothes than in the items we expect,
like disposable plates or straws.
- Textile waste is a very large problem.
- Every year, billions of garments go to landfills.
And when this happens, your clothes
don't just break down and become one with the Earth.
This is what a single pair of jeans looks like after sitting
in a compost bin for a year.
- Textiles are these complex mixtures
of different materials:
Cotton
Polyester
Spandex
Nylon
Acrylic
- You can't really do anything with that material.
You kind of have to reinvent recycling.
- What if, instead of reducing textile waste,
your next T-shirt could just be made
from an old pair of leggings?
These two chemists have developed a way to separate
these fabrics at the molecular level,
in order to do just that.
- Chemical recycling is kind of the Holy Grail
of fashion.
- With the older, extracted material,
they're creating a brand new fabric that can be reworn and
then recycled again and again.
- Can I grab this right here and like show it?
- This is Just Might Work,
a show about surprising solutions
to our biggest problems.
- Garments get shipped around the world as bales,
and so these are your standard 1,200 pound bales.
- Right now, when you want to get rid of
your clothes, you typically donate them,
but eventually all clothes will become unusable.
- We essentially collect garments
to learn more about what it is, and start testing it
in our plant here.
If you look in your closet, it's a mixture of stuff.
This is some sort of technical outerwear.
You can tell there's some poly/span,
maybe 91/9 poly/span.
- Shay Sethi is a chemist and molecular biologist
who, before starting Ambercycle,
knew very little about the fashion industry.
- My co-founder and I were roommates in college.
We really wanted to do something about a big problem,
and we thought plastic pollution was a pretty big one.
- Shay and his co-founder Moby Ahmed
first thought that they would work to refine
the waste stream of plastic water bottles.
And they kept coming back to one ingredient, polyester.
- That seemed like a logical place to start.
For the past 4,000 years,
our clothing has been mostly one material, and that's
cellulose, or cotton.
If you look at the 12th century,
all of our clothing was recycled into paper and as
populations grew, the need for new materials grew as well.
As early as 1940,
the invention of polyester changed the fashion industry.
Asia has really grown from this foundation of polyester,
where it's been a very easy-to-manufacture
material from the vast oil resources
that have been developed.
As early as 2004, polyester's overtaken cotton
as the number one material in fashion.
This garment, 100% polyester, look at that.
- During their time at college, the two discovered
how to chemically separate polyester from fabric
and turn it into a new material,
creating the Ambercycle process.
- What we're essentially doing is
purifying and separating polyester
from blended textile waste.
So, clothes come in and we remove the hardware,
buttons, zippers, things like that.
Take the base textile, and we chop it up;
it goes through a shredding device.
Those shreds then go into a series of, basically, chemical
reactors; it almost looks like an oil refinery.
We're turning the polyester into a soup,
and cleaning it up and building it back up.
Really the way to think about it is we're mining for
polyester from mixed textile waste.
Once we've purified the polyester,
we convert that back into yarns
and fibers to make new clothing.
We call our yarn and fiber Cycora.
- Beyond figuring out the technical aspects
of Ambercycle, Sethi and Ahmed are particularly focused
on making what's known as a circular economy
truly viable for the entire fashion industry.
- The linear economy is the utilization of materials
in one or two life cycles,
and then those materials ending up in the waste stream.
The circular economy is the idea that the materials we use
can be reused, almost infinitely,
reducing the amount of material that’s going to landfill,
and reducing the need for new materials from the Earth.
- If we could use these materials more responsibly,
they can be regenerated and put back into the cycle
again and again and again,
but that has to exist in the kind of infrastructure that
we're developing.
- Getting a garment from someone's closet
back into the apparel supply chain
is a very, very tricky thing to do because
if there's any bit of friction in that process,
you're going to disincentivize people from wanting to do it.
We're trialing things ourself,
and we're also working with a number of different companies,
small, medium, and large in the space.
The one that we're really interested in is a concept called
"The Digital Passport."
When you buy a garment made with Cycora,
some of them will have a QR code that's on the care label,
and this will help inform people about the best options
about what to do with their garment
once it's at its end of life.
- Buying and cycling through clothes
is an important way individuals around the world
express themselves today.
And as more people across the globe gain access to cheaply
constructed fashion,
this trend is predicted to increase exponentially.
- We don't think that's really gonna slow down.
If anything, it's only gonna increase
at a faster rate than it is today.
And so we have to focus on turning that old material back
into new stuff.
- Our vision is within the next three years
to be producing 50,000 tons per year of Cycora.
And that's material that otherwise would've been
incinerated, and it's also displacing material
that otherwise would’ve come from oil.
- When the fashion industry started,
it was all about making garments luxurious or different,
but the fundamental basics of clothing are about stories.
And so many designers
are using sustainability to tell a new
and compelling story because it's one of these things that
literally touches every single person;
it's clothing.
At the end of the day,
our process will be so significantly beneficial
for the environment;
it's going to be hard to imagine why we ever even worked at
extracting oil from the Earth to make polyester.