Name: The accidental discovery that could help solve fashion's biggest problem
Uploaded: 2025-07-24T18:26:33.000Z
Duration: 12 min 36 s
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When polyester was invented, the goal was to create a durable and resistant fabric that could retain its color and shape without wrinkles.

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Nearly 85 years later, polyester is everywhere.

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Today, most clothes contain synthetic material, and much of that material is derived from plastic.

What made this fabric magic at one point is now the reason for its disrepute.

And with less than 1% of textile waste recycled into new garments, the vast majority of the clothes we wear end up in landfill.

Between 22 and 23, manufacturing of textile fibers in the world grew from 116 to 124 million tons.

Now, the problem with polyester, it's not going to disappear.

But what if there was a way to break down these fibers and recycle polyester into new clothing infinitely?

It's a question that prompted French engineering group Technip Energies to collaborate with American business tech leader IBM.

Riju is aiming at building a complete ecosystem to tackle the challenge of textile-to-textile recycling.

We have been concerned about circularity in the carbon economy for a long time.

And that led, over a couple of years of conversations with Arnaud, to saying, let's see if we can progress this to whether it's real, not just a science lab experiment.

What's unique about Riju is our ability to take the polyester out and then depolymerize the polyester.

We could potentially not need to take any new raw materials out of the ground to make polyester.

The whole story started at Technip Energies in one of our labs.

And the team telling us, listen, we do have something around textile-to-textile recycling.

In order to achieve the complete flow sheet, we need a few partners.

One of our researchers had come up with a way to find a much, much more cost-effective way, in principle, of recycling a particular kind of polyester called PET.

And then we said, all right, but we are not going to be in this business.

So how do we find a partner who might be interested?

And we were looking for a new technology to enable us to really get access to polyester at scale from textile source in the future.

IBM had a technology called Volcat at the time that they announced in 2019.

While you can already buy clothes made from recycled polyester, most of it comes from plastic bottles, not recycled clothing.

A textile-to-textile solution that cuts recycled bottles from the process altogether could prove to be a more sustainable solution.

You break it down into bits and parts to go back to the monomer.

You regenerate the monomer, so the basic molecule, and you recreate the long chain again.

It's named chemical recycling, so there's no burning, there's no heat.

And in the process, we are purifying the product.

We're separating polyester from cotton, from dye, and you rebuild a longer chain of the polymer itself.

Two, that we can scale this up probably better than no one else.

And then it's, you know, as a citizen of the world, you think about the hundreds of millions of tons of textile being dumped into deserts every year, and that is a concern to me.

Technip Energies is best known for energy engineering, such as LNG, hydrogen, and carbon capture.

But the company has also been involved in the chemical market.

In 2014, the firm, under a previous entity, acquired Zimmer Polymer in Frankfurt, one of the originators of polyester science and manufacturing.

The core knowledge is around the molecule.

So we can go from whatever feedstock, oil, gas, and transform that into whatever end product.

What's missing today is really the entire slice, if you like, in the circularity model of textile-to-textile regeneration or recycling that begins from waste aggregation all the way to reintroduction into the textile value chain.

We realized that if we were going to be able to be successful, it was not just about the technology.

We own a certain amount of the intellectual property.

We have given it to Reju as part of our equity share in the entity.

Total investments so far, including, I would say, the Regeneration Hub Zero that we have built and erected in Frankfurt is something around 100 million euro to date.

Today, we're very, very lucky and very fortunate.

You know, we have one of the largest engineering companies in the world behind us, and currently being, you know, 100% also funded by Technip Energies.

Reju started about four or five years ago.

In 2025, for example, we said that this could represent up to another 15 million.

We are likely going to open the capital of Reju to other parties interested into the scale-up.

As I talked to Arnaud and some of his people, it became clear in my head, what we tend to do is very, very high-end science, and I'm okay to put very expensive people and equipment against it, but when you really need to make it scale, it's kind of got to work, as I put it.

The plant may cost a couple of hundred million dollars.

You've got these steel pipes and processes and distillation things.

We have actually designed most of the technology you see in this place inside of our company, which is, of course, a competitive advantage, but also something that's very challenging because you do not know, to begin with, whether everything is going to work, you know, seamlessly.

So that's one of the reasons why you build one of these demo plants.

Each plant will generate or recycle 50,000 tons per annum.

So if you do 10 plants, you're in a half-million ton, so it's already half of what is being recycled today, and our ambition is certainly not to stop at two plants or 10 plants, but to go 20, 40.

Our team who was working on it really came at it from a science perspective.

They weren't necessarily the best at thinking about if it gets up to 100,000 metric tons a year, what will that scale look like?

IBM, much larger company than Technip Energies.

So to be able to align, I would say, the pace of an IBM or a Technip Energies to IBM, we go probably a lot faster than they go.

But the beauty is that with Arvind, IBM CEO, basically he aligned his organization and he gave them the space to breathe and to move at our pace.

And then the big challenge that we were facing and we are still facing is, why do you think that Riju is going to succeed where everyone else has failed?

The textile-to-textile market, while nascent, has been growing through different parts of the supply chain.

German company Soex focuses on sorting clothing by material and color, using AI in the recognition process.

American business CERC is the developer of a technology that separates polyester from cotton without damaging the fibers.

And Firm Avenue recycles cotton fibers by shredding and liquefying them into pulp, allowing them to extrude new fibers for clothing.

If you would have asked me five years ago or 10 years ago, Patrick, you're going to be the CEO of a chemical engineering company, I would have probably thought that you were a little bit crazy.

We've learned from IBM how digital can actually accelerate innovation.

From Patrick, we've learned about branding and the power of marketing.

I learned a lot about how lean can one be when one is taking something from the lab into real life.

He was trying to think through, how do I go small?

Patrick, for example, joining Riju and being the CEO of Riju, he knew about his value chain from a sporting, I mean, from a brand perspective.

What to buy, where from, with what quality.

And by the way, on a side note, Arnaud and I share a love for fast cars, so that actually also became a lot of fun to talk about all along the way.

So in spite of the distance, in spite of the fact that we were meeting through Teams, we found really very quickly a common ground, a common interest and a common ambition.

It was about doing good, but it was about doing good through a business.

So the returns are not financial today because we went from lab to demo plant and next is to go full scale.

So the returns would start kicking in 2027, 2028 and beyond.

Regeneration Hub Zero opened in Frankfurt, Germany in October 2024.

The demo plant has the capacity to produce 1,000 metric tons per year of the brand's proprietary product, RegiPolyester.

So what we have here is pure polyester, which is something that we need when we begin to calibrate all of the equipment inside of Regeneration Hub Zero.

And this is what it looks like coming in.

And also after we're done here at Regeneration Hub Zero, what we polymerize back into.

So this is actually what's needed to make fibers and yarns again in the circular loop.

Inside of here, you have over 500 valves, 42 kilometers of electrical wiring, four kilometers of pipe and also over 200 different process instruments.

Regi's technology is based off the Volcat or Volatile Catalyst developed by IBM.

The process involves rejuvenating PET found in some packaging and polyester.