“I’ve spent decades working for brands (Under Armour, The North Face, Timberland, Jansport, Smartwool, Reef, Peak Performance, Gore-Tex, Vans) that make clothes that people love. Yet, too many of these garments have ended up in landfills or incinerated. And increasing global consumption and fast fashion are only accelerating this problem,” says Patrik Frisk after decades in the garment industry.
After reaching the top, Frisk stepped down as CEO, not to retire but to “do some good in the sunset years of my career”. The dynamic entrepreneur wants to “reset the industry” and thus started Reju a year ago, a textile-to-textile regeneration company, after five years of preparation.
Reju uses VolCat technology from IBM research, enabling the selective breakdown of polymers and addressing hard-to-recycle polyester garments. FashionUnited recently had a chance to ask Frisk some questions on a Zoom call when he was briefing journalists about the new 1000 tonne Regeneration Hub Zero in Frankfurt, Germany.
Let’s jump right in – why start with polyester?
Because it is the biggest problem: 75 percent of all fibres are polyester and it is a problem, of course, because it does not disintegrate. It is also made out of a finite resource, that is two good reasons right there. Polyester textile waste is one of the biggest sustainability challenges faced by our society. It is the most widely used type of synthetic fibre in the world. According to Textile Exchange data from 2022, over 60 million tonnes of polyester fibres are produced annually, yet less than 1 percent of global textile waste is recycled into new fibres for clothing according to 2012 data by the European Commission.
The third reason is that the technology is available now for the first time and it is good. Because the technology needs to be fast, highly efficient and provide a good yield.
Another reason is that polyester fibre is too good a fibre to give up for the industry. It is too developed, it is too much of a commodity. Plus, it is too integrated into the downstream supply chain to be able to be replaced. And it is not only used by the textile and garment industry – it is everywhere, there is the automotive industry, airline interiors, carpets, etc.
What about the cotton that gets separated from the mixed material garments?
That is project number two (laughs). We know how to handle the cotton too but we are just not focusing on that right now because we have to get the polyester right first.
We have work streams on the dye as well. Dyes are also a big problem but nobody is talking about that. Four to six percent of a garment is dye – it is an opportunity and we believe we can recycle that over time too. The dye is more of a problem, and is harder to separate for cotton than for polyester. Do we think it is solvable? Yes, we do. But the technology we began with was not made to address cotton, it was made to address polyester. We are currently developing chemistry specifically to address cotton.
This doesn’t mean, by the way, that we are not able to use the cotton. We are very much able to offset the cotton into the cellulose waste stream to be made into fibres; so we can already do that. But ultimately the way we think about this is as no waste. We believe we can ultimately also recycle elastane or spandex. We think there is an opportunity doing that and we have people who are interested in that. Essentially there is very little that you can’t reuse.
With more knowledge gained in the process, do you think there will still be material mixes in the future?
That is hard to say. I would hope that in the future we would be able to handle the mixes, it will get much easier. But it will also be about making better yarns and fabrics. Ultimately, we need to give consumers a better product and I believe we can do that. If we can make more singular-material garments, great; if we can make sure we make better yarns and fabrics, great, because they will have less impact while staying in use.
Keyword better products – how will Reju tackle the new EU apparel regulations?
We have created our own positioning and we are very clear on the importance of coordinating the different efforts. We are creating schemes like EPR [Extended Producer Responsibility, ed.] for the brands, making sure that the effort in that area is going into investing back into the infrastructure to actually help with the waste.
So if you have an end producers responsibility programme, you want to make sure that the money that is being paid into that programme is actually used for infrastructure that can help recycle some of that waste. So we are engaging at the highest level on many different topics to make sure that our voice is heard. And I must say, what is very encouraging, is that at every instance at EU level, they are willing to listen. They need the input from the industry. We are also very active in the Euratex effort in Europe and their Rehubs effort as well.
While textile-to-textile recycling is the need of the hour, it is not easy to start such a company and to keep it afloat. What are you doing differently from players in the field like Renewcell (now Circulose) and Soex, for example?
We are taking a holistic view. As a company, from day number one, we have understood that to be able to unlock textile circularity, you need to understand the entire ecosystem. You also need to make sure you have capabilities that are effective not just in regeneration but also when recovering and ultimately recirculation.
So for us, it begins with the fact that we have waste management experts, chemical engineers, construction engineers, textile engineers – we have seasoned management across. All that functionality inside such a young company is really important and critical because you have to connect the dots.
Also having an understanding that technology is only the key; the unlock is again that you are connecting the dots. You have to have a technology that is suitable for industrialisation. We know that the technology we have is the fastest and the most efficient, so it uses the least amount of energy but also has the highest yield. So all those three things are very critical if you want to have an economical scale of what you are building.
So the right technology with the right staffing, experience and knowledge and a solid feedstock supply. If you don’t have that, it is easy to somewhere down the line to leave a gap, which by definition is not going to be a chain. What we have seen so far is very good intent and some great projects but maybe in some cases missing some of the components.
For example, we have spent more time working to ensure that we have a solid feedstock supply into our technology, which is unique and related to textiles, it is the only technology that can also take mixed post-consumer materials. That is what we are able to take, separate the materials away from the polyester, depolymerise and turn it back into polyester.
Once you have what we deliver, which is regen polyester, you have to be able to integrate that into the brand that you are selling to. And if you have that opportunity that we have where we essentially clean the molecule or polyester down to its polymer, so you are taking away all the impurities, all the PFAs, all the bad stuff, and build it all back into a great quality polyester.
We have an opportunity not just to deliver on the promise that we have to the brands of textile-to-textile regenerative polyester, we also have an opportunity to work with the brands to make better yarns and fabrics so that it is truly textile-to-textile all the way out to the consumer. And making that journey a better journey so that the second life is a better product, making sure that the polyester makes a better yarn and fabric and ultimately garment. So we believe in this upcycling idea. When you just tell the consumer that something is more ‘green,’ we won’t know that they will make a better choice based on that. But if you make a point that it feels better, performs better, I think you have a better chance of convincing the consumer that this is a really good thing.
In regards to feedstock supply, I believe you just entered into a new collaboration?
Yes, we are collaborating with Nouvelles Fibres Textiles (NFT), a French company specialising in the recovery of end-of-life textiles, on the sourcing and recycling of textile waste to support the building of a circular ecosystem in France. NFT will supply secondary raw materials derived from used or unused waste textiles to Reju for recycling and production of regenerated Reju Polyester.
With the collection of textile waste mandatory in the European Union starting in 2025, it is imperative we have scalable systems and partnerships to process what is collected and keep it from landfills or incineration. Together, Reju and NFT are building the technology and infrastructure to regenerate and reuse materials across industries and change the way
we use our resources.
Apart from NFT, who are your main partners?
We work with brands, sorters and collectors, yarn spinners and polymer creators primarily, and are supported by investors, non-profits, retailers, logistics providers, local governments and coalitions.We recently entered a partnership with Goodwill Industries and Waste Management (WM), North America’s leading provider of comprehensive environmental solutions.
Where else do you get your material, the feedstock?
We have a few more partners from Europe. It is a mix of different countries and different sources within the countries, some of it is coming from the general waste but that is not a big source yet because EU directive to separate textile waste comes into effect in January 2025 so that is something for the future. There are also some of the sorters you mentioned, some non-profits, companies that are in the business of making things; this is a lot of different opportunities. We are talking to close to 100 different sources across Europe alone and connecting into the various opportunities to make an impact over time into those different waste streams.
Can you tell us a bit more about the “Regeneration Hub Zero” in Frankfurt, Germany. Why did you choose this location?
What is unique about the way we are working is that as we have been building the regeneration hub here in Frankfurt, we have had about 80 to 90 engineers working on site, so we have an incredible amount of expertise and experience right there.
When we created the joint venture with IBM in 2021, one of the reasons why IBM chose Technip (Reju’s mother company) is because of their extensive experience in polymer science. Technip has built over a thousand polyester plants and bought a company called Zimmer in Frankfurt about 20 years ago, Zimmer being one of the originators of polyester science and polyester manufacturing. And about a third of all the capacity that exists in the world today in terms of polyester manufacturing is done in a factory that has been touched by Technip and the Zimmer team at some point. All engineers from Zimmer are in Frankfurt.
I think it is a missed point sometimes when we talk about regeneration or recycling of polyester – any one of the technologies that is currently available out there will not always give you polyester at the end but a polymer. Once you have depolymerised your waste, you are going to have to repolymerise it and the advantage we have in Frankfurt is that we have a polymer plant, right next to our regeneration plant. We are able to take the textile waste and depolymerise and then immediately, with the BHGT that we get, which is essentially a white powder, put it straight into the polymerisation plant and make polyester out of it. Big advantage for us, which gives us great speed to market.
Any plans for more regeneration hubs?
Yes but our first European large-scale regeneration hub will not be built in Frankfurt. The reason being when you look at the criteria for building in this field, you are going to automatically look at being in a chemical site. The reason being that you have all the utilities that you need and in our case, we are also making sure that we are close to places where we can ship in an as environmental way as possible, close to rail or close to water. When you look at the life cycle analysis, the location of where you build is very important in terms of your carbon footprint, which has partially to do with what kind of energy you can get to drive your regeneration hub but also the water usage. So we are weighing all the different aspects of the environmental envelope as well.
Remember that we are also B Corp pending. We decided to immediately apply for B Corp status when we became a company. For us, being a manufacturer, there are many things that we need to think of from a diligence perspective but we already know that we are going to meet all of the criteria. We are not going to be able to be fully certified until we have been in business for two years but we have pending status now. Just to give you an idea of the diligence and discipline that we have put in place from day one.
For 2026/27, we are planning the next two regeneration hubs and have narrowed it down to three sites in Europe and two in the US, making a decision by the end of the year. We are very busy building the upstream feedstock and organising around that while we continue to work to make sure that the technology is doing what we want it to do and of course having many conversations downstream in terms of the off-take.
We are also creating an educational environment for our regeneration hubs, to make sure that we are demystifying chemical recycling and recycling in general. We see this as an opportunity to educate not just the industry but also those outside the industry so that we can make more progress for the planet.