Textile-to-textile recycled polyester is having a moment.
In November, Swedish recycler Syre announced it will become Nike’s lead strategic supplier of textile-to-textile recycled polyester in a multi-year agreement. Although the specifics haven’t been publicized, Syre’s chief commercial officer Jad Finck describes it as having “significant scale and duration”, with time frames matched up to the construction of Syre’s plant in Vietnam, slated to begin in 2027.
Nike will also source from Syre’s Canadian peer Loop Industries, which describes the brand as an “anchor customer”.
The dual announcement comes hot on the heels of Gap and Target launching partnerships with Syre in June 2025. Zara-owned Inditex signed a three-year agreement for recycled polyester with US-based textile-to-textile recycling company Ambercycle in 2023, followed by further offtake agreements by Danish fashion brand Ganni and outdoors label REI in 2025. Also this year, American company Circ launched the Fiber Club, a pre-competitive group with retailers including Bestseller and Everlane, to scale the adoption of recycled materials.
Deals are emerging as the fashion industry attempts to wean itself off plastic bottles. They currently make up 98% of all recycled polyester feedstock, according to data from global non-profit Textile Exchange, which formulates its work around a goal of 45% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from fiber and raw materials production by 2030.
Without contaminants such as fiber blends, zips, linings and the myriad other components that go into a garment to deal with, plastic bottles have long represented a more time and cost-efficient feedstock for recycled polyester. But they should only ever have been considered a stop gap along the road to textile-to-textile circularity, says Beth Jensen, chief impact officer at Textile Exchange.
“There’s a growing recognition of the textile waste problem. Extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws are coming out, not only in the EU and US states, but other jurisdictions as well, and companies are going to have to take responsibility for the waste they’re creating,” says Jensen. There are also signals coming from policymakers that bottle-based feedstocks may not be counted as a recycled material within future circular textile legislation, she continues, so the imperative for brands to get to grips with their own mountainous waste is intensifying.
A question of scale
No matter how motivated the brand or looming the legislation, the means to recycle old polyester textiles into new simply haven’t existed at the necessary scale to make a meaningful dent in that mountain.
Brands and recyclers are banking on the new crop of offtake agreements to drive sorely needed scale across the next few years. “Polyester accounts for about 22% [of the group’s overall material use, behind cotton at 55%]. Our goal is to completely phase out virgin fossil-based polyester by 2025 and only source certified recycled polyester for our products,” says Cecilia Strömblad Brännsten, H&M Group’s head of resource use and circularity. “We are gradually increasing the share of textile-to-textile recycled polyester and will continue to do so in line with availability.” Rather than wait for that availability, H&M sought to create it, co-founding Syre — which will utilize both pre and post-consumer textiles — alongside Swedish investment firm Vargas Holding in 2024, securing an offtake agreement worth $600 million over seven years.
Syre’s Finck describes the Nike deal as a “foundational offtake”. “It’s the kind of thing that we can finance a plant with and bring in a lot of customers that aren’t necessarily first movers but are fast followers when they see something this significant get commitment,” he says, adding that the industry needs to see plants going into the ground at pace on the heels of big, long-term contract announcements.
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Finck credits the way Syre was founded with its ability to drum up such big business within just two years of launch. “We had the benefit of being founded by a major customer, a major user, a major player in retailing. They looked at the scale of the problem and the majority fiber and said, ‘We’re going to need something at a totally different scale and support them by giving them a very, very large offtake,’” says Finck. This baked-in scale along with investment from TPG Rise Climate, whose impact portfolio runs into billions of dollars, was instrumental for putting Syre on the radar of Nike and other such major players, he believes. (Nike declined to comment for this story.)
Rachel Kitchin, senior corporate climate campaigner at environmental campaign non-profit Stand Earth, is excited by the deal between Nike and Syre, and others of its kind. Its annual Fossil-Free Fashion Scorecard, which ranks global fashion companies on their efforts to phase out fossil fuels, puts a 20% score weighting on low-carbon and longer lasting materials, which includes textile-to-textile recycled materials.
“We’ve been calling for significant investment in textile-to-textile industries, and this is pretty big news in moving true circularity forward because it’s going to take significant investment and scaling to make it feasible,” Kitchin says.
Syre is aiming to scale gradually, reaching a metric ton capacity of between 100,000 and 250,000 at its Vietnam plant. French company Reju, owned by energy company Technip Energies, is another that launched with built-in scale. Reju’s next plant, located in the Netherlands, will recycle the equivalent of 300 million items annually (the company is focusing only on post-consumer textiles) resulting in 50,000 tons of raw material, which can then be repolymerized and turned into regenerated polyester, according to the company.
Reju and Syre are working at previously unreached scales, but the figures are still a drop in the ocean compared to the 78 million tons of polyester being produced each year. “Even in the best of scenarios, 10 years out, and my competitors and myself all build exactly what we said we would, we’ll be making something like eight or nine million tons [of recycled polyester] in a world that [will be] producing 100 million-plus tons [of virgin]. So, we’re not even going to be having an impact of more than maybe a few percentage points,” says Frisk.
Growth cannot go unchecked
Recycled polyester production increased by 400,000 tons between 2023 and 2024, but its market share decreased by 0.5 percentage points due a simultaneous increase in virgin polyester production. “The production of virgin fossil-based polyester is the biggest issue today,” says Textile Exchange’s Jensen. “The volume question deserves the most focus within that category specifically.”
While the wider availability of textile-to-textile recycled polyester could theoretically offset the need to produce as much virgin polyester, therefore tempering its growing impact, if brands don’t tackle growth in tandem with scaling recycling, they risk making the problem too big for innovators to catch up with. “There’s a lot of projections out there showing north of a 10 million ton supply gap between what companies are going to need in [textile-to-textile recycled polyester] and what the best projections of suppliers like Syre will be able to supply,” says Finck.
“The real impact is that we’re still adding more waste into the world. The goal is, ultimately, to reduce the volume of products that are circulating, not keep increasing them,” says Kitchin. It’s a conundrum already witnessed in plastics. Though recycling for many plastic products and packaging is widely available to consumers across many countries, recycling rates hover at around 9%, while plastic production has doubled since 2000.
But those in the recycling space believe they have to try, despite the odds. “What’s the alternative? You’re not going to try to start to solve the problem?” asks Frisk.
“[Textile-to-textile recycling] is never going to be a perfect solution,” says Kitchin. “But it is going to be a necessary one.”
