Steve: If there were fibers that essentially are circular, if you use them, right. Because we know we can take a glass Coke bottle and either wash it and reuse it as a Coke bottle or melt it. It’s still glass. It can be made into another Coke bottle.
Aluminum – sort of the same thing, although that is very large power grid footprint, essentially liquid solid electricity.
Are there fibers that we should be looking at because they’re easier to do that with?
Alex: Yeah, it’s a good question. I would say that polyester is probably the most likely fiber that is going to get there soon. And that’s partially because you can recycle polyester more, and you can down cycle and up-cycle it a lot easier than things like nylon.
It requires a lot less cleaning and you can do it at a higher temperature. So it’s easy in some cases to clean it with heat versus with lots of water and chemistry. But there are challenges to polyester.
The other thing that I would say – somebody smarter than me would probably answer that there are some cellulosic fibers out there that the ‘Lensings’ of the world are investigating and wood and pulp and stuff like that.
But then you’re like, all right, so the detractors of the world – and you’re going to get people that argue any answer, any cool technology you come up with – like, all right, mow down all the wood in the world and make cellulosic fiber out of it? No, no, no. We’ll use like corn. How about Serona? Well, you got to use a catalyst that’s pretty nasty, that’s still derived from petroleum.
And so you’re going to take the food stocks away from the starving people in the third world to make your fancy fashion clothing, your fashion t-shirt? Hey, slow down. Some of that corn is not actually edible. It’s a by-product. It’s “sell the corn to the dairy farms and then we get the stuff that’s on the end of it”.
We can extract the cellulose. Okay. Well that’s chemistry. That’s energy. There’s an answer for any of that, that somebody will say is not good enough. So the real answer to that question is, “I don’t know. Because I don’t think that technology exists yet.”
So to become a fully circular apparel industry, there’s an innovation gap we cannot solve right now.
