This week on the show, Emma speaks to Patrik Frisk, who is the CEO of Reju. Reju is working to recycle polyester at unprecedented speed and scale to keep up with the fashion industry’s consumption of it.
Owned by Technip Energies – an engineering and technology company – Reju’s polyester is made from 100% textile waste that would be buried or burned, with no bottle chips used, in theory making it completely traceable and helping to build a more open supply chain.
Patrik has had a particularly interesting career path in fashion, spending decades working for brands including Under Armour, The North Face, Timberland, and Vans. Even before the rise of fast fashion, he noticed that too many of these garments were ending up in landfills or incinerated. This drove him and his co-founders to use their expertise, their knowledge of the apparel industry, and their understanding of organisational frameworks to find new ways to use the materials clothing is made of when it reaches the end of its useful life. Reju’s particular mission is applying this philosophy to polyester – which is one of the biggest sustainability challenges, as it remains the most widely used type of synthetic fibre in the world, at a time when synthetic usage continues to grow.
In this episode, Patrik and Emma unpack the undertaking of recycling textiles on an industrial scale, what it will take to find traction and industry buy-in, why other institutions may have failed and why Reju’s modus operandi is different, and what the ideal longer-term vision is for textile-to-textile recycling and the circular economy.
Listen to the full 35-minute show below (or by following The Interline Podcast through your podcast / audio app of choice) and read on for some additional details.
Key talking points from Emma and Patrik’s conversation:
- Why Reju chose to focus on recycling polyester, and what level of scalability is possible.
- The technology that Reju uses and whether – in the current state of the fashion industry – it is necessary to have a tech company backing a fashion startup with big ambitions.
- Why collaboration is critical when it comes to industrialising recycling and placing it where it can deliver the most impact.
- An update on Reju’s recycling facility and how it aims to deliver on its mission going forward.
- What will make recycling at a massive, industrialised scale work when narrower industrialisation initiatives have already struggled or failed.
- The post-consumer side of recycling, and whether Reju has a vision to become an integral part of the secondary market.
- Reju’s vision for the coming years, as well as their longer-term vision for textile-to-textile recycling and the circular economy.
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