Upcycling Textile Waste with Circ
Julie Willoughby serves as the Chief Commercialization Officer at Circ, and in this episode, we are talking about fast fashion, the clothing industry, and Circ's role in bringing circularity to the world of polyester and cotton. According to statistics from The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the equivalent of a garbage truckload of clothes is burned or buried in a landfill every second, and clothing production in the world has doubled in the last 15 years, with each garment being used only half as much as before.
Our conversation with Julie explores the environmental challenges posed by polyester and cotton, including the contribution of polyester laundering to ocean microplastics and the significant water consumption of cotton cultivation and textile dying. Julie, a chemical engineer, shares her journey from academia and Nike to joining Circ, emphasizing the urgent need for change in the fashion industry.
Circ, a post-series B company, employs innovative technology to transform textile waste into recycled thread. Notable investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Patagonia's Tin Shed Ventures, and Inditex, the parent company of Zara. The conversation concludes with an examination of the fashion industry's progress toward sustainability, questioning whether mainstream practices are transitioning actively or if circularity and sustainability remain primarily in the realm of research and development.
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Episode recorded on Oct 23, 2023 (Published on Nov 30, 2023)
In this episode, we cover:
Julie's background in chemical engineering
Her return to academia at NC State
Julie's experience at Nike and transition to Circ
Societal and environmental impacts of fast fashion
Circ's process of recycling (upcycling) polyester and cotton
The rising market demand for recycled materials and reasons for this shift
Circ's investors and partnerships
The tipping point for sustainability in the fashion industry
Why customer experiences and stories are critical
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Cody Simms:
Today on My Climate Journey startup series, our guest is Julie Willoughby, Chief Commercialization Officer at Circ, and we are talking about fast fashion, the clothing industry, and how Circ's process is bringing circularity to the world of polyester and cotton. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has a deep dive on their website on fashion and the circular economy. It includes stats like every second the equivalent of a garbage truckload of clothes is burned or buried in a landfill, and clothing production in the world has doubled in the last 15 years. While each piece of clothing is only used about half as many times as in the past.
So basically we're making and buying and throwing away a lot more stuff than we used to. It's not really a surprise if you think about it, but it's certainly not something that's on the right trajectory. Meanwhile, the laundering of polyester clothes creates around a third of all microplastics in the ocean. Cotton is one of the world's thirstiest crops. Producing a simple cotton T-shirt takes hundreds of gallons of water, and textile dying is one of the greatest sources of water pollution.
Finally, if the fashion industry continues on its current path, by 2050 it could use more than 25% of the carbon budget associated with a two degrees Celsius global warming limit. Circ is seeking to change all of this. Julie is joining me to walk through her background as a chemical engineer and the path she took through academia and Nike to join Circ. She breaks down some of the challenges with the fashion industry and why it's grown as it has over the last couple of decades.
And then she talks about how Circ's technology works to transform textile, scrap and used material into recycled thread. Circ is post series B and its investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Patagonia's Tin Shed Ventures, Inditex, which is the parent company of Zara, and a host of other notable venture capital funds and fashion brands.
We conclude our chat with a conversation about where fashion is on the tipping point scale of adopting sustainability. Is the industry actively funding the transition of its mainstream business practices, or is circularity and sustainability more of an R&D project? And if so, when will this tipping point occur? But before we start, I'm Cody Simms.
Yin Lu:
I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs:
And I'm Jason Jacobs. And welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu:
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Jason Jacobs:
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help.
Cody Simms:
Julie, welcome to the show.
Julie Willoughby:
Well, thanks Cody. It's great to be here.
Cody Simms:
Julie, I am excited for this conversation because we haven't done a whole lot on the show about fashion. And as I've come to learn, the fashion industry is a really growing contributor to a lot of factors that relate to climate change or just environmental impact in general. And at Circ, you all are doing your best to try to slow that down is my understanding.
Julie Willoughby:
That's right. We're on a mission to protect the planet from the cost of clothing.
Cody Simms:
Well, let's start first before we get into Circ and what you all do. Let's start with your background because you have a fascinating background, really, really deep in material science and chemistry. And so maybe explain to us how you got started in this whole space in the first place.
Julie Willoughby:
I've been a chemical engineer for over 30 years, but I've had a fascinating journey. I think it's brought me so exposure to so many opportunities and challenges that were really warranted needing analysis and solving. And where I've liked to say is that all the roads prior to Circ led me here because I was in the chemical industry as a traditional chemical engineering at Dow Silicones.
And then I decided after 11 and a half years there that I should go get my PhD in chemical engineering. So that's what I did and studied things like polymer physics and surface chemistry, which ended up bringing me into packaging. And so that was in 2007 when I went to work for MeadWestvaco, and the five-year hiatus I had in academia, it's like everything had shifted from development to innovation.
And then the other thing that happened while I was deep in my graduate work was the Walmart sustainability scorecard. And so as packaging came and barrier coatings were really taking off is how do you eliminate plastic? How do you eliminate that plastic that's extruded onto a plastic cup and then it goes into the landfill and it's not fully degrading because of it being.
Cody Simms:
What was the Walmart sustainability scorecard?
Julie Willoughby:
So they gave it to every supplier of theirs and you had to meet certain criteria or they wouldn't buy your goods. So Walmart has a really clever marketing and savvy marketing platform, and that was their way to really drive suppliers to change, to be like, we're going to pick this product if you don't meet our score. And I can't remember everything that was on it. It wasn't my job to measure it. It was my job to invent the science to create coatings that could replace plastic.
Cody Simms:
So this was at MeadWestvaco, you were basically responsible for plastic alternative packaging.
Julie Willoughby:
That's correct.
Cody Simms:
The next question I have is you started out with this career in chemical engineering and it sounds like you identify as a chemical engineer. My perception is that the bulk of chemical engineering as a practice really emerged with the rise of how do we take fossil fuels and turn them into usable chemical? It's very heavily petrochemically based, at least as an initial growth engine of the industry. Is that a correct perception?
Julie Willoughby:
That's interesting. I don't have that perception, but I'm wondering if others do. So now I want to go to investigate that. And so many of the chemical engineering departments do so much more. And even all these bioplastics that are out there, biopolymers, you have to use the same unit operations that you do for making products from fossil fuels.
And if you look at the pulp and paper industry, that's a chemistry rich industry, and that is also chemical engineers are predominantly in that field. You have pulp and paper science engineers too. But I would say it certainly takes off, and any graduating chemical engineer will tell you that the oil, the fossil fuel companies will pay the highest. So it is very lucrative for graduates to get work in that field.
Cody Simms:
Got it. I guess my sort of perception of that comes with the fact that so much of our built environment is using materials that are ultimately somehow hydrocarbon derived at its base level. I don't know if that's true. That's just the kind of 10,000 foot view I have when I think of that whole space of expertise.
Julie Willoughby:
I think commodity products and where plastics, and there was that famous phrase in the graduate where, and that was in the '60s, and chemical engineering existed before the '60s, and it was like-
Cody Simms:
The future is plastics, right? Is that the phrase?
Julie Willoughby:
Yes, yes. That is the phrase. And I think the challenge for chemical engineers today, all engineers, is to make energy efficient processes that use less utilities that look at ways to create... I mean, the reason I do chemical engineering and why I still use the principles I've learned and solidified is because you really can take the chemistry, which is everyone, chemistry or molecules, and how do you arrange those molecules into products that people want or actually serve an impact for people into the medical field.
So I think it's hard to just blanket it all as, okay, this is hydrocarbons are bad. It's more of how we're treating the products that we're making and also how are we making the products.
Cody Simms:
Oh, yeah. And by the way, I wasn't meaning to put chemical engineers in some bad box at all. I was basically saying for 100 years we had this incredible amount of byproduct from creating oil, and a lot of that is to chemistry. And so that byproduct was less turned into plastics to a large degree.
Julie Willoughby:
I don't have the percentages, but I think it's probably only when I look at the distribution of students going in to their profession coming out of school, I don't think it's a 50/50 split. I think it's probably only 25% go into that oil rich field.
Cody Simms:
Okay, got it.
Julie Willoughby:
It might be a little higher.
Cody Simms:
Super helpful. Thank you. Thank you. That's super clarifying. So what prompted you to say, I'm in industry now, now I'm going to go teach?
Julie Willoughby:
This is a fun story because the chemical engineering building, you go to NC State's campus, anyone's been there just even over the last 10 years, it's exploded. They're new campus. And we were one of the first departments to move over to the new campus. The name of that building was EB one, Engineering Building one. It was really unique the way they named that.
And then during the course of my grad school, I met my wonderful husband, and right at the end, we didn't want to leave Raleigh, North Carolina. It's a great place to live. And so I went back to school to run my own research group to be a faculty member. And one thing about chemical engineering is that a lot of jobs are in a remote area because the factories are in a remote area. So I was like, "I want to live more in a college town, and I've always wanted to really dive in deep into the science and have a group of students doing research."
And so I took that brief time at MeadWestvaco and it was a fascinating experience, great friendships there, and they're now called WestRock. I took that time really because of life choices. And then when the company was regrouping, that was right around 2008, 2009 when everything, when the housing market crashed and everyone was resetting their business strategies and visions, I had the opportunity to go with them to Richmond, Virginia, but I opted not to because we weren't ready to leave Raleigh. My husband's a native.
And literally the Center for Packaging Innovation, which is where I went after being a grad student, I just walked down the hill because it was on NC State's campus. And then I walked across the street to the College of Textiles to start my faculty position. And literally because MeadWestvaco was moving, I was even taking, they were loading me up with push carts of lab supplies to take with me. That was my duration. I guess, I spent almost 11 years. Yeah, I did 11 years on NC State Centennial Campus in three different capacities.
Cody Simms:
All right, so from there then, you were in this position of assistant professor at NC State working on textile engineering, and then you got the call from a little shoe company in Oregon.
Julie Willoughby:
That's right.
Cody Simms:
Explain how that happened.
Julie Willoughby:
Actually, I mean, my three years I was on the tenure track and I had just been reappointed. But what I was doing during my three years as a faculty member is I was running a research group, but I was also teaching. I think I was a little bit on the fence, am I really ready to give up industry? So when the department head, I was exploring the opportunity and the department head said, "You'd be really good at teaching our capstone senior design course. You can help relate the students to industry." And I'm like, "Yeah, I would be."
And the little alarm bells were going off because that's not the traditional course that a tenure track faculty would take because it's not really related to your research. But I did it and I had so much fun, by the way, I had a great research portfolio too. I was awarded a Bill and Melinda Gates Grand Challenge Exploration for protecting crops. And I won the phase one award, which is like, I don't know, 1% chance of that. And then went on.
My student Jing Chow, she's no longer a student, she's amazing. And she works at Meta right now, but she was the one responsible to the two. We got with the team, we got the data that allowed us to get a phase two grant, which is even more rare. I think that goes down to 0.1%.
And then when I left NC State, I transferred it to my fantastic colleagues there, Charlie Harperman in the Plant Biology group, and they took it to commercialization. And this was all in Africa and it was all stimuli response of... I started working with pH stimuli responsive plant biology nano particles. So that was one side.
The other side, I was recruiting companies like Hayes, like Nike, Dow Corning came. I had startups, Windlift was one. There were all kinds of different initiatives. And I redesigned, we had a great strong program before I came, but when I came to the department I was in was textile engineering, chemistry and science. And what they had there, and what they still do is you almost have your own mini corporation because you have the polymer chemist, the polymer and color chemistry, then you have the engineers, the textile engineering, and then you have the textile technologies that put all the fibers together.
So with that, I combined two groups. I combined textile engineering, textile technology, and I recruited, I probably recruited over 15 companies for using raise like $50,000 that would all go to the students for either improvements in the lab or their lab use fees. And then got to be with them for the whole year to teach them how to run an innovation product. And one of those companies was Nike.
So Nike came and I met these amazing individuals, all very focused around sustainability, John Frazier and Scott Eccles. And they were intrigued in my research because it was that hydrophilic hydrophobic thing that I talked about in my grad school was very applicable to apparel as you can imagine, like how do you get rid of a Teflon fluorinated membrane in order to stay dry and still have it breathe?
And so as we talked about creating a research portfolio together, I also recruited them into the senior design course. So I had this group of students who worked on the Nike project for a couple of years. They sponsored two projects. And during the course of all that and talking about a research portfolio, they had a position open that they started talking to me about. And I was just like, this is the hardest. I've made a lot of hard decisions in my life, but that one is a really hard one because students are like, they're like your children. You see, you grow them up and you teach them how.
And fortunately, when I told my department head, who was John Rust, who was a great friend as well, he said, "Oh, that's not a problem. You just stay on as a no pay faculty and then you can finish getting your students served." So that's what I did. So I've remained an adjunct faculty and was able to graduate students after I moved to Oregon.
Cody Simms:
Oh, that's awesome. You had two roles at Nike over the course of what, six or seven years? Maybe explain a little bit about the work you did there.
Julie Willoughby:
So as I was saying, the material science innovation, it was really understanding and trying to see the new technology. So it's not different from a VC world where you're looking at these new early technologies. Now I do think there's these different stages. How upstream do you want to be? So I think we were too upstream for real innovation. I mean, you want innovation, you're still in a product company, you need to move it fast. And much of this really the sexy stuff that comes out like structural color and how are you going to do that? It takes years to develop and scale that.
And so when we started moving it into more applied, I looked at where my background I've been and the other initiatives at Nike and I jumped over. We had another initiative called Manufacturing Revolution, and that was affectionately called Man Rev. And it was all about new methods to make for footwear because making footwear hasn't changed. And really each shoe you're wearing is almost like it's handmade because it touches 200 hands between the start and the finish because it is such an intricate process.
So what I did is when I moved into the next role, that was one where in the first organization, the platform was already developed and what we were going to do in the second role, I developed the platform. So I saw a need for coatings, which had been a theme in my prior work, and I saw a real big need to develop a platform that would enable us to put chemistries only where they need it to be.
So instead of, if you look at a roll of good, so a roll of fabric, you'll put coatings on those. So a synthetic leather or sometimes you call those vegan leathers is one such example, but you're putting it on a full 60 inch wide roll and it's hundreds of meters long and all that is chemistry. That's all chemistry all coming from fossil fuels for the most part. And if you don't need to put on that whole entire roll, because when you cut out a pattern, there's about 30% waste.
Now you can do a lot with pattern efficiencies to minimize that waste, but you're still going to have waste. And then if it has a coating on it that can't be recycled very easily, because you've put it on this a polyester support frame, which could have been recycled. But once you stick the coating on top of it's not as easy to recycle it. And so we were working on both the chemistry formulations and how to digitally apply those.
Cody Simms:
By the way, I think vegan leather is such a creative brand name for a way to refer to something that is plastic.
Julie Willoughby:
You're right. And there are initiatives in trying to make your mycelium leathers or doing something out of proteins. And those all have the issue of scale, but they're promising.
Cody Simms:
Yep. That's the hope, right, is that those non fossil fuel, non-plastic based technologies can find breakthrough.
Julie Willoughby:
That's right.
Cody Simms:
This role at Nike, was this really the first time you began focusing heavily on the fabric and apparel space?
Julie Willoughby:
As far as research sort of, but I mean, I would say I did it, the College of Textiles, ironically, I'm an avid seamstress, so I made my wedding dresses.
Cody Simms:
Oh, wow.
Julie Willoughby:
Yeah. I started sewing when I was four, making things that would fall apart or making a pair of pants and missing the legs, those kinds of things. And I would always put the patterns together and did it all the way through. In the '80s, I went to a parochial school and wore a uniform. I was one of seven. We didn't have a lot of disposable income. My dad worked really hard and paid tuition for all of us to get through and have great education. That's what was prioritized and as it should be.
And I didn't have that many extra clothes because I didn't need them. And they were also expensive. And that's why I started sewing and my mom sewed all our clothes. She would make our clothes. And so I would look at something expensive in the store and be like, "I can make that." It was all about economics or getting the right style or the right type of feel. And so that's what I did. Even for my wedding, I've made my full wedding dress and three bridesmaids dresses, which is crazy. It was like a year in development. So that was my textiles. So I love textiles. I love fabric, I love patterns.
Cody Simms:
Well, I mean, it sounds to me like you found a personal passion or interest early on in your life. You went into chemistry, somehow subconsciously worked on applications in chemistry that could be applied to fashion. I'm not sure if that's why you started with those applications and then you landed in a role at Nike where all of a sudden you were working on this all the time. And that was your jumping off point for I think where you are today at Circ, which is you're actually trying to redesign how the whole industry works.
Julie Willoughby:
Yes, that's right. So it is exciting. So ironically, how I came to meet Circ, we were called Titan Biosciences and a former postdoc of mine who's now at Apple, we worked together on cellulose and lignin and trees. So it was always like a mix between natural materials and then those coming from fossil fuels. And she called me up one day and she said, "Hey, Julie...," she formerly worked at Adidas. And she goes, "I know this company because we've been looking at circularity and they're looking for a chief scientific officer and they're small, but I think from everything I've seen, they're very legit."
So she introduced me to Peter Majeranowski and Connor Hartman, the CEO and COO of Circ, and the rest is history. So I saw firsthand when I was at Nike, the amount of waste. We were trying to keep all the cut waste at Nike pure, virgin pure. So as soon as you start laminating and mixing up different materials together, they become harder to separate. So it was definitely spoke to me in that way. And they just closed on their Series A with Patagonia, which allowed them to bring me on board.
Cody Simms:
Oh, that's awesome. Well, let's start unpacking a little bit about the challenges of the clothing and fashion industry today. You have a great page on your website. You call, "The Cost of Clothing" on the Circ website. And it says things like, "The average garment that we own is only worn seven to 10 times before being discarded, and the average person buys 60% more clothing today than 15 years ago." And I think I've read an asterisk to that that says, "and only keeps clothes for about half as long." I don't think that part's on your website. I think I've seen that stat somewhere also.
Julie Willoughby:
Yes.
Cody Simms:
I think it was the Ellen MacArthur Foundation that did a really great summary of the fast fashion problem and its contributions to both emissions and waste. Why has all this happened? What changes has the industry gone onto that has caused this incredible amount of wasteful consumption?
Julie Willoughby:
I mentioned in the '90s I was at Dow Corning at the time, now it's Dow Silicones. As we were talking about my background, I was on a product process market team that was called the North American Textiles Group because here's many silicone finishes that go into your textile clothing. So I saw in the '90s working at Dow Corning, just what happened to the textile industry here in the U.S.
And so I would say that back then in the '90s, the clothes still the full impact of fast fashion and the cost of clothing, how inexpensive it became, wasn't really realized until towards the late '90s after NAFTA and after much was offshore to Asia going after the cheaper labor. I mean, obviously cheap labor. And I don't know that they're necessarily worse materials because I just read an article a couple of days that many times you'll have different levels of clothing brands under the same roof using some of the same materials.
Now, what fast fashion has done, it actually did something really good for social impact is that it democratized fashion. So if you look back until I told my story, I didn't have that much. And it was also there was a lot of barring going on when I was in a sorority, it was great because I had 40 girls closets to access that we were baring and trading, which is like that's a circular economy in itself.
And what fast fashion has done is it copies what's on... It gets its inspiration or actually looks at the luxury brands and the fashion trendsetters, and then it scales it back to a place where the fabrics aren't quite as luxurious. They're not sewn. So I mentioned I'm a seamstress. I used to be really picky and I still am about how the seams are finished. And they're not finished the way I would do or if it was lined or not lined, and it was just deconstructing that garment to make it easier and faster to process.
And so what that gave is people with lower incomes the ability to be fashionable, which is great. So now unfortunately we keep growing as a population. So that's one of the things. If you hear that we're buying 60% more and then we're growing at a rate of 10% every year, it's just not sustainable to keep tapping these resources that we keep pulling from the earth. And that's true with natural with cotton.
Cody Simms:
And how much of it has been the transition from cotton based clothing to polyester based clothing that's been underway for a long time, what, 50 years plus I guess, but most clothing today has some form of polyester blend to it, I presume. Is that accurate?
Julie Willoughby:
I think that statistic is something like 66% is a poly cotton. It might be a little higher. So here's the thing, cotton itself, and there are great research, great agriculture innovations to grow cotton that is more tolerant to droughts that doesn't need as much water, is grown indoors, uses less pesticides. But all that, the story of cotton, you'll hear it's a dirty crop.
Now if you look at cotton as a whole, I mean it has such a history that is based on awful human treatment, slavery and child labor and all that. And so cotton is natural, but it still has a pretty significant impact negatively into our environment, and it can still go to the landfill. So even though it's cotton, it'll still go to the landfill if it's still incinerated, it's kind of combined. So I think it's hard to say it's polyester or cotton that's doing it. It's just like it is our mass consumption. It is the fact that people have more disposable incomes and things are made cheaper.
I pull out some stuff from the '90s and I look at the price tag, especially from the fabric stores. I'm like, "Really? I paid this much and it's the same price now." And so I think that's been part of it. It's just been the huge economies of scale that the fashion industry went after and the fact that there wasn't much legislation or regulation into environmental practices in these developing countries where the cheap labor was. And fortunately that's being corrected.
Yin Lu:
Hey everyone, I'm Yin a partner at MCJ Collective here to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally.
Each week we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share is a deep curiosity to learn and a bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change. Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams have met, several nonprofits have been established, and a bunch of hiring has been done.
Many early stage investments have been made as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly Women in Climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, Climate Book Club, art workshops and more. Whether you've been in the climate space for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms:
It's such an interesting and complex topic because I think what you're pointing out, what I'm hearing is like most things in climate, there's no one answer. Stop doing this right? And the whole world will be solved, right? Cotton, as you point out, is a dirty crop has all these horrible societal underpinnings to it. I think I read that the average T-shirt takes 700 gallons of water to produce, which would be eight cups a day of water for three and a half years. For a typical human, that's a lot of water for one cotton T-shirt
Julie Willoughby:
That is a lot of water.
Cody Simms:
And yet polyester, something like a third of all microplastics in the ocean come from laundering polyester clothing and the little microplastics that peel off the clothes and go through your washing machine and ultimately drain to the ocean. Both of these things essentially are causing problems. And we've increased production of all of it in order to make clothes lower cost and more accessible for everybody, which is good.
Generally, people can feel like their societal equals not based on what they wear, and yet something's got to give, right? All these things are causing problems. And so I suppose that's sort of what Circ is trying to solve, which is can we stop creating new of all of this? Can we start reusing what we have?
Julie Willoughby:
That's exactly right. And we do see ourselves, it's like we're the last end, so we want clothes to be made well. We want sustainable fashion to be accessible to all. So we just had a beautiful launch last week with dress with Mara Hoffman, and it was gorgeous. And it was a small collection that is 35, I think it was 35 dresses, which is what we said.
And we need to scale that so we can make that 3,500 dresses so that we can make that everyone can buy a Mara Hoffman dress. It might not be Mare Hoffman, but it can be a sustainably made garment. And I think that's the most important. And what Circ can do is, and what I've been since I joined Circ, it's like we're tapping into resources that previously were just thought of waste and trash. We use these untapped resources, the polyester and cotton, to make new circular fibers, circular polyester fibers and new circular lyocell fiber.
So lyocell is a manmade, hesitate to say cotton, but cotton is a cellulose. And so once you take the cotton out from our patented technology, we take the cotton and we put it in, it's called a regenerative cellulose. And the old method of making that, it was like a viscous rayon method, especially the rayon.
That process wasn't environmentally friendly, but the new method of making regenerated lyocell, it's completely closed loop. It makes a beautiful silk like fabric. And that was the same filament that was made for the Mara Hoffman launch. And it was the same type of filament that was used for the Czar launch back in April. It has this great feel to it.
Cody Simms:
So Circ takes existing fabrics clothing, used clothing, runs them through a process to separate and then outputs both essentially raw polyester and this material you call lyocell, which is like a rayon replacements that will feel silky, I guess, to the touch. And those both become essentially spools of new thread that can be turned into new fabric. Am I understanding correctly how your process works?
Julie Willoughby:
Pretty much. So what I like to say is we liquefy the polyester. So if you take polyester cotton, you can't really pull those two out. So there's different innovators that will take the cotton and recycle that, and those are great. And then there's the polyester blending you can do, I mean, recycling of polyester that has been around for a while in the '90s. It's just no one wanted to recycle. I remember being a young chemical engineer and trying to do the environmental thing. It's like, no, it's cheaper to send it to waste treatment and they need it, so let's keep them running.
Cody Simms:
That feels like the story of everything to do with plastic. It's like it's always cheaper to just use new stuff.
Julie Willoughby:
Yes, it's cheaper. So what we do is we liquefy the polyester through our hydrothermal process, and that's what we have patented. And then we take that out. And if you look at it, just imagine putting your T-shirt and a pressure cooker on your pot and then with some water, and then we use some benign chemistry that will break the polyester down through a hydrolysis process.
And then that is what makes tartaric acid, it breaks it down to make monomers, and those monomers are liquid. I don't know if I just threw some terms out that you might not know. A monomer is like a single building block of a long plastic chain, and a plastic chain is also called a polymer. So polymeric materials can be plastic.
Cody Simms:
So let's go through each stage of this process so that our listeners can understand how it works. So step one is you take this textile waste, where do you source it from? Is there a whole part of the Circ business that is intaking used textiles from somewhere?
Julie Willoughby:
So I joined the company actually November 1st, 2019. It'll be four years next year.
Cody Simms:
Okay. Congrats.
Julie Willoughby:
Thank you. And then what happened in early 2020 COVID hit, I had a small team of three. We didn't have our process built. We had a little lab reactor and we were doing one T-shirt a day when I started. And we fortunately had just rented a warehouse, a big empty warehouse, and we started getting calls like Patagonia, who's our lead investor for the series A. They had this great program, it's called Worn Wear. It's all the Patagonia goes through a really strict processing intake before they would resell it.
And then I don't know what the percentages of what got resold, but the rest of that could be sent to Circ, was diverted to Circ. With all those supply chains shutting down, we got calls from so many people, can you take a container? Can you take 10 containers, unsold goods? So that's where much of it can come from is unsold good.
It's like I think at 30%, and that's where some innovation can happen with consumer analytics is not overproducing better predict what the consumer will buy through some algorithm, artificial intelligence that will allow manufacturers to be more accurate in their predictions.
Cody Simms:
As a comparative to what you just shared, I had on the pod a little while ago, a fellow named Bill Caesar, he's the CEO of Generate Upcycle, which is Generate Capital's Upcycle business. They do things like anaerobic digestion of food waste and agricultural waste as well as composting. And he shared a similar sort of anecdote, which is they get calls from people all over the place with all sorts of random stuff that was overstocked on the shelves and now they need to deal with it.
I think he talked about one time they had a vodka producer who had some vodka that got recalled or something and they had just crates of vodka they had to figure out what to do with. And it might've been like alcoholic seltzer, I don't remember what it was. But anyway, it doesn't matter.
I'm hearing similar kind of thing as you, which is like you don't even necessarily know where these inputs are coming from, but you are building a brand as the offtaker, if you will, of this waste fabric. What are the economics of that look like? Are these fabric owners, for lack of better term, paying you to take the fabric or are you buying it from them at a low cost typically?
Julie Willoughby:
So right now we should get a tipping fee because polyester cotton-
Cody Simms:
So similar to Generate Upcycle.
Julie Willoughby:
... yeah, polyester cotton, it can only be downcycled. Right now we upcycle it, we make it into really valuable product. Just for examples, we closed on our series B that was the summer of 2022 I think. Yeah, because it's 2023. Yeah, so summer of 2022, it was Bill Gates, Breakthrough Energy Ventures that was the lead investor on that.
So it felt like just such a huge vote of competence in the Circ technology because the technical diligence on the Breakthrough Energy went through was very deep. And so that was a testament to how solid our technology is. And we were very honored to have them lead our B round and it was oversubscribed. And we had that also that came in with that round was Inditex was the mothership of Zara.
And so with that round, our milestones are to complete the engineering for the first integrated end-to-end facility for textile recycling. So where you take the textiles in and then you mechanically size it so it can feed into our process to liquefy the polyester, but then after you liquefy the polyester, you have to separate the cotton.
So imagine opening up that pressure cooker I talked about. And you have a bunch of cotton rags now that were half the weight as they were because half of that weight was polyester that turned a liquid. So they almost, we call them like cotton skeletons. And you have to filter out just like if you dumped it into your spaghetti into a colander and drained the water out. So that's what we do. We dump out the cotton, we collect the cotton, and then all that liquid stream, that's gold. That's our polyester liquor. That's gold to us.
I mean both are gold because we have this beautiful cotton pulp and that is what's turned into the lyocell or manmade cellulose fiber that right now the majority of that is from trees. So the way that you make those cellulose fibers today, the manmade, the lyocells, the rayons, the viscose and rayons, not too many people, they've all transitioned to the viscoe process.
They use tree pulp and tree pulp means we have to keep cutting down trees and we don't want to cut those trees down, we want to keep them up so they're sequestering our CO2. So we use that cotton pulp to make the lyocell and then on the polyester side extract the monomers and repolymerize the monomers to make the polyester.
Cody Simms:
Okay, so I'm going to try to simplify what I'm hearing just to make sure I'm following. So on the front end, step one is you collect waste fabrics and that business looks a lot like food waste, agricultural waste sort of recycling where you're getting paid a tipping fee to take the stuff in because it's waste that you're helping them to deal with. They were going to have to throw it away a landfill it or burn it or do something terrible with it if you didn't step in.
Julie Willoughby:
And a lot of that waste is coming direct from the cut and sew factory. So that's what I meant to say is that we do have all this other waste and post-consumer waste, we can treat that too. But you're right. So imagine all the facilities out there that are creating garments and they have all this waste. What are they going to do with it? They send it to us.
Cody Simms:
For the most part. Otherwise they're landfilling it or burning.
Julie Willoughby:
That's right.
Cody Simms:
Both of which are generally not good. So then they send it to you, you then take it, you put it in these big pressure cookers, I think you call it a hydrothermal process.
Julie Willoughby:
That's right.
Cody Simms:
You said water and benign chemicals. So let me ask about that. Like water we've already established growing virgin cotton takes a lot of water. We've established that polyester throws off a lot of microplastics into water. Are you doing anything here from a water perspective that is also better or is there still a lot of water waste that comes out of your process?
Julie Willoughby:
So it's not waste. Everything we use is closed loop. So the water we put into the process, we then recover it. It's a continual closed loop system.
Cody Simms:
Wow, awesome. So you're able to reuse the water that you run through your process for the next batch you do after you've treated it.
Julie Willoughby:
Exactly.
Cody Simms:
And you said benign chemicals, you're not ending up with cools of acids that you're having to throw off somewhere in the planet?
Julie Willoughby:
No, it's pretty standard. It's like standard chemistry that you would be using to make say even your paper. So it's the paper that you write on. So I think it's just a way to, the benign chemistry is just that it's just a pH adjuster. And so by changing the pH you can accelerate the reaction. And so we do this continuously and by doing it continuously, we are able to get the economies to scale. So you have to build it. That's the next thing.
I mean, everyone asks like, "Is this economical?" Well, yes, it's economical. The plastics industry became a commodity because the big producers back in the day, the Eastman's, the Exxon's, they made commodity polyester and they made it at hundreds and thousands of tons a day. Well, our first facility is going to make 33,000 tons of recycled polyester from textiles.
So that gives you an idea. If we're running 200 tons a day and these big commodity producers are running at thousands and thousands of tons a day, you still have an economy scale to catch up. So there is these early adapters. And I'll tell you, I've been an engineer scientist as you know for many years and I have never encountered such a strong market pull for the product. Usually the engineer scientists, we get frustrated because it's like technology push, push, push. We can't get marketing on board. Now we cannot make it fast enough. We cannot build it fast enough.
Cody Simms:
We're going to come to your commercialization in a minute, let me just make sure I get us through the process. So you've got this pressure cooker. The water in it now is being recycled through the system. The chemistries that you put in it are not creating pools of acids or tailings or things like that that are dirty secret nobody talks about.
And then essentially, the fabrics that are in this liquid, you said the polyesters essentially melt off them into liquid and you're left with essentially the remains of cotton. And those remains of cotton get turned into this essentially rayon like material, lyocell I think you called it. And the polyester liquid then can get essentially reformulated back into polyester thread when all said and done. Am I fully understanding at this point?
Julie Willoughby:
Yes, that's right.
Cody Simms:
And these happen in large factory facilities that you own and operate. These are not happening on site at a existing materials company or an existing fabrics company as well. Is that the correct assumption or is that a TBD?
Julie Willoughby:
No, it's not a TBD. So I mentioned just four years ago that we were operating everything in the lab and one reactor, one T-shirt at a time. You cannot be engineer and build a facility of the scale we're talking about in that amount of time. While you're building, basically we're building the car and trying to drive it at the same time. But where we've really been able to step back is say we've had great partners.
So Andritz is one of our partners and we were able to basically rent out 50% of that facility. So that is a commercially relevant facility where we were able... that was demonstrated, that was our big breakthrough was to take it from a batch. So you said batch, which you probably didn't realize what that meant, but for unit operations and techno economic analysis, you want continuous processes because those are the most profitable processes.
And when you're talking about these types of materials, which really still they will get a premium because there's still not the supply that the demand is creating, but you need to run continuous. And that's what we were able to do with the Andritz team is taking our science and using this basically. It's not off the shelf, but we'll say it's off the shelf equipment because they don't have big reactors sitting on the shelf waiting for someone to buy them. They engineer it to your specifications.
So that's what we've been doing is running our process there and then doing the final processing at our Danville facility. So we take the pulp out at the Ohio facility and then the polyester liquor purification of the monomers are done in Danville, Virginia. And then we work with partners to repolymerize them. And so this is all created this design where we're going end to end.
Cody Simms:
And you had mentioned earlier on, not related to your product, but I think it was maybe when you were at Nike, you said oftentimes these raw polyester fibers by themselves totally fine to recycle them. The problem is you add all this coating and all this stuff on them for the most part and that's what causes problems. How does your process deal with that?
Julie Willoughby:
We filter it out essentially we'll break it down and we filter it out. And so at this point we are able to concentrate it. So if you look at just on a volume scale, you have all those dyes and finishes that are put on textile products today. They're going to a landfill or being incinerated, which you don't know what's being incinerated and what that breaking down of that molecule is going to happen.
And so we pull them out, we extract them out through filtration in the water stream and then it's concentrated. So you're going to orders a magnitude lower of what would then be handled responsibly by a chemical waste facility.
Cody Simms:
There is waste by product, but this is stuff that would wasted anyway that you're having to navigate responsibly afterward?
Julie Willoughby:
Yeah, it'd be wasted in a volume size, it would take up acres and land acres where we might condense it down to an eight ounce jar.
Cody Simms:
Got it. And so let's talk about some of the commercial partnerships you have thus far. You talked a bit about the fact that the parent company behind Zara is an investor. Seems like you're also exploring some commercial relationships with them as well. Is that correct?
Julie Willoughby:
Yes, they're committed to take our product. So publicly, their CEO said that they're going to use all recycled materials by the year 2030. We just did a back of the envelope calculation on what that means for a Circ facility and we're going to have to hurry up and get building. I mean it's way over 10 and that's a scale that makes sense. So that makes sense from a standpoint of the throughput.
I mean what we're producing out of our first commercial facility, we're in a semi-commercial arrangement now, but when we have our integrated facility from end to end, we're still just like a drop in the ocean of what is needed to satisfy just a single Inditex demand of using all recycled materials by 2030.
Cody Simms:
And Julie, you mentioned that this is the first time you've seen to where you can't produce enough product to satisfy demand. What has caused that seismic shift in demand for recycled material for recycled fashion? Is it public pressure? Is it net zero pledges that these companies are making? Is it just general awareness of the challenge of fast fashion?
Because at the end of the day, as we talked about virgin plastics are cheap, it's really hard for these companies when they are having to pay more for a sustainable alternative to justify doing it in any kind of scale.
Julie Willoughby:
You're right. Well, the scale requires capital. So you really need the people making the commitments to invest in the infrastructure that is going to make us a better world because we can't keep going the way we are. As far as the shift as to why it's now, it's unfortunate, but people have realized that global warming is real. I'm in Philadelphia right now and it's almost 70 in the end of October. That's not normal.
The fires that have existed, the droughts that have existed, the extreme temperatures, I mean, it's just sad. And so much of younger generations is really sad to hear. Some of them just give up and like, "Well, I'm doomed. I'm not going to have a family because I don't want my kids doomed into this world." I think we have a responsibility as humans on this planet to clean it up, but it's going to take time. And it's also going to take pressure and the pressure has come through regulation.
So Europe is leading the way on this and it's described as the chief sustainability officer. It's a regulation tsunami coming down. So where certain amount of materials they're not going to be able to send in Europe any textiles to a landfill, it'll take... How are you going to prevent sending the everyday average consumer from putting something in their garbage can? But it's just like these things happen. We used to send asphalt shingles to a garbage can and people don't do that anymore. They recycle the proper way. I think that is a shift.
I think one thing that is easy to forget when you're working in this space is that not everyone understands it like you do or is as passionate as you are about climate technologies. They just don't get it. So there is an education piece out there for the consumer, but it's also like look at the iPhone, in 2007 it didn't exist and now none of us could imagine not having a smartphone. And that hasn't been that long ago. Then why did everyone like it? Is because it was an experience.
So if we can figure out a way to make a community out of recycling and having better sustainable products, I think we can really drive this even further for the consumer, make them want to recycle.
Cody Simms:
The analogy that sticks to me hearing your continue call for, "Hey, at the end of the day, the technology is there. We need people to step up and fund scaling out the infrastructure to make this stuff happen at scale." The analogy that I'm reminded of is actually electric cars, which is for decades we had prototypes of like a solar car or this sort of thing at the Detroit Auto Show and the big car companies would get up and say, "Look at all of this stuff we're doing for the environment and to be sustainable."
And then we all now know we're actively blocking legislation, trying to drive down or trying to increase fuel efficiency and or legislation in California about pushing electric car adoption, et cetera. And it finally tipped. It tipped a few years ago, mostly because of Tesla where now all the big automakers are realizing there's consumer demand for EVs and they have all finally are moving their production facilities to really fund EV battery manufacturing and fund the creation of EVs as a mass vehicle. And legislation is tipped and all that stuff is tipped.
I have a bit of skepticism in fashion personally that it's easy to parade around a few garments that were sustainably created and use them as PR. If the main engine isn't trying to drive toward this stuff, how real is it going to be? And I'm curious as an insider in the industry where you think we are in that transition.
Julie Willoughby:
I mean, it's hard to say that we're not in the early days because the facilities don't exist yet. And as far as the ones that are pumping out everyday pounds, we have a great facility that we have a supply chain and great partners that we can work with where we're doing our process and we have enough to, for instance, Mara Hoffman claimed that they cited, they're switching all their product to Circ lyocell of that market. And we have enough capacity to do that right now.
And we work with our partner in ASLAN in, it's called ACE Green in Taiwan, and they take our cotton pulp and they will produce it to the specification, say for the likes of Mara Hoffman and more that will keep the market interest because we can't go quiet. We have to keep feeding the market and the appetite of our product while we are building with our engineering partners while we're putting steel in the ground and building this first really kick-ass facility. And I think it has to change.
And I know that my past colleagues from Nike, it's real. When I left Nike, nowhere had I seen in the six years that I was there. I mean, sustainability was always an initiative, but there wasn't a project that could go forward if it didn't meet sustainability first. So I think fortunately now, the transparency that the H&M's, the Zara's of the world are using with their fabric, I mean there is a lot of attention on these brands to ensure they're making good product.
So I am hopeful, but it also means don't throw away your clothes and trade them. Buy vintage. I mean, since I took this job and became even more aware, I haven't thrown any clothes away and my husband had to build me a bigger closet. And then it's like eating low fat cookies or sugar-free cookies. I go to a vintage shop. I have no guilt buying anything in a vintage shop or a thrift store.
Cody Simms:
Well, I mean, look, we've seen the transition happen in automotive or it's happening in automotive. It could still happen faster but it's happening. We're seeing it happen in just the energy we consume in our daily lives as more and more grid moves renewable as well. There's no doubt that what we wear every day is one of the most visible things we all interact with, and it's a purchase decision we make more frequently than buying a car or thinking about where our home power comes from.
And so it's a good message you're sharing, which is all of us can vote with our wallet, and ultimately this needs to be a systems change. But the more each of us make daily decisions, it drives pressure in the right ways.
Julie Willoughby:
It does. I'll give you an example of the consumer experience. So Madewell is a great brand. I have a 14-year-old daughter, and that's her favorite brand of jeans. We go down there and the jeans aren't, I mean they're not cheap, but they're like mainstream. They're a hundred bucks, and if you get them on sale a little bit less, but Madewell will give you $50 for any type of jean you bring in. It doesn't even have to be a Madewell jean.
And so now we live about 50 minutes away from a Madewell. So she has this big stack of jeans that she's saving to bring down to Madewell. And those are the types of things that creates brand loyalty, that you tell the stories. I mean, you need a story behind this. You can't just create, here's the science, here's the engineering, and then it falls flat. You have to have that story behind it too.
Cody Simms:
I love it. Well, Julie, I so appreciate you coming on. I know I asked some hard questions, but just trying to understand the space and the work you all are doing are on the front end of trying to change the way this whole industry works, which we all touch and feel on a daily basis. And it's such a big deal.
Julie Willoughby:
It is a big deal, and it's important. The team at Circ, it's been an honor to be with them, to take them through this journey over the last four years.
Cody Simms:
Well, I'm so glad you've decided to take all of the skills and experience you built on your career and apply it to this problem. And the more people who are listening who can figure out how you can do the same, it all makes a difference. And so Julie, thanks for the work you're doing.
Julie Willoughby:
No problem. Thanks Cody, for bringing this delight to the masses.
Jason Jacobs:
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast. At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity. If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at mcjcollective.com. And if you have a guest suggestion, let us know that via Twitter @mcjpod.
Yin Lu:
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Jason Jacobs:
Thanks and see you next episode.
