Athleisure wear giant Lululemon is putting its support behind textile recycling tech company Syntetica as part of a latest round of fundraising that has pulled in $30 million in investment.
The French startup announced the total from its Series A funding round on Thursday following the development of an in-house process that takes collected consumer waste, extracts two types of nylon and uses its processing to create new fabric.
The latest round was led by Ecotechnologies 2, a venture capital fund managed by Bpifrance which is a French public investment bank. MAS Holdings, one of South Asia’s largest apparel-tech manufacturers, and Lululemon represent the industry figures who have also pledged support to Syntetica. Additional participants included Swen Capital Partners, the European Innovation Council, EQT Ventures, family offices and several other private investors.
Syntetica has now raised $38 million since it was founded in 2023 and will turn its attention toward building true scalable solutions and ramping up its supply chain.
According to the company, a four part process is key to it recycling Nylon 6 and Nylon 6,6 but post-consumer and industrial textile waste must first be sorted and carefully shredded. Using its proprietary method, even blended textiles like cotton, elastane and polyester can be processed and have key targeted materials extracted.
In the second step a low-temperature and low-pressure chemical process breaks down the blended items at the molecular level as nylon fiber begin to be separated while maintaining quality.
The recovered materials go through a refinement stage to “remove dyes, finishes and residual impurities” leaving a cleaner yield that is nearly ready to go back into a production cycle and turn into useable fabric.
For the final part of the process, the recovered nylon is “rebuilt” and formed into pellets that can be worked into a range of new products and closes “the loop on textile waste.”
Syntetica describes Nylon 6 as the “soft, versatile backbone of modern materials. Nylon 6 runs through activewear to swimwear, from carpets to compounding. Until now, recycled nylon 6 came almost entirely from one source: discarded fishing nets, making true circularity a real blocker.”
Nylon 6,6 differs from its sibling and is categorized as the “stronger, more heat-resistant nylon. Nylon 6,6’s properties fit technical apparel, outdoor gear, and demanding industrial parts. In return for those properties, it had no recycling solution at all.”
Around one percent of textiles are recycled into new materials with well over $100 billion textile waste incinerated each year.
“For decades, mixed nylon waste has been considered too complex and too expensive to recycle at scale, Syntetica co-founder Marco Bertone said. “We have shown that it is possible to recover high-value materials from the waste streams the industry has historically written off. This funding allows us to move from breakthrough chemistry to industrial reality and accelerate the transition to more circular materials.”
