With Michelin, Lululemon, and Victoria’s Secret among its backers, Syntetica has raised $30 million to scale a process that recycles blended nylon in leggings and swimwear the industry could never reuse.
Recycled nylon has a scale problem, and France’s Syntetica has raised $30 million to crack the hardest part of it. The Paris startup closed a Series A in July led by the Ecotechnologies 2 fund, which Bpifrance manages for the French government, with the activewear brand Lululemon and the Sri Lankan manufacturing giant MAS Holdings both putting money in.
Syntetica says it can recycle the kind of nylon the industry had all but given up on, the blended, mixed-fiber sort inside leggings, swimsuits, and lingerie. That is the part that has never worked. Nylon is a petroleum-derived synthetic, and manufacturers almost never use it straight, cutting it with elastane, cotton, or polyester to get the stretch and drape a garment needs, and those blends don’t work with conventional recycling systems. Recycled nylon still makes up only about 2 percent of the roughly 7 million tons produced every year, while post-consumer textiles pile up to nearly 80 percent of all textile waste. Blended nylon has essentially been a dead end. Brands have leaned on virgin, petroleum-based nylon because it is cheap and reliable, and the recycled version that does exist has mostly come from tidy industrial scraps rather than the clothes people actually wear and send back.
“For decades, mixed nylon waste has been considered too complex and too expensive to recycle at scale,” Marco Bertone, Syntetica’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “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.”
Why blended nylon has been almost impossible to recycle
Nylon is not one material but several, and the two that dominate clothing do not come apart the same way. Nylon 6 breaks back down to a single building block, the monomer caprolactam, while Nylon 6,6 has to be split into two, hexamethylenediamine and adipic acid. A recycler built for one usually cannot touch the other, and neither handles a garment that shows up dyed, coated, and stitched into a blend. The best-known recycled nylon on the market, Aquafil’s Econyl, sidesteps all of that by working with cleaner single-material waste like discarded fishing nets and carpet, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, not the tangled post-consumer textiles in a collection bin.
Syntetica’s claim is that its low-temperature chemical process takes both Nylon 6 and Nylon 6,6 out of nylon-rich mixed textiles with no pre-sorting, strips out the elastane and cotton, and turns what is left into high-purity pellets a yarn maker can spin as if it were new. Recycling the blends instead of only the clean streams is the whole game, and the people who study the field say it is the piece the industry has been missing. “Apparel is very rarely made from a single fiber so being able to recycle mixed fibres is the only way we can create true circularly for the industry,” Paul Riley, the chief executive and founder of the recycling company Samsara Eco, told Chemical Engineering.
Because the process recovers purified Nylon 6 and Nylon 6,6 rather than a downgraded hybrid, Syntetica pitches its pellets for automotive and industrial uses as well as clothing, according to Michelin, which is part of why a tiremaker and a lingerie house have ended up at the same table.
Lululemon and Victoria’s Secret are backing the technology
The brands backing Syntetica are hedging against a supply chain that is increasignly exposed, and Bertone sells it in exactly those terms, insisting the material has to win on price or it does not matter. “We have built the company with the clarity that there’s no green premium,” he told TechCrunch. “That if you want to scale real solutions for a sustainable world, it needs to be cost competitive, highly scalable, and you need to build partnerships from the very start.”
“It’s been a wake-up call to many brands that have been relying on petrol-sourced nylon and petrol-sourced synthetics for pricing and convenience, and which today have seen massive shocks to their system,” Bertone said, pointing to the price swings that have rattled petroleum-based fibers. Syntetica is already running pilots with Victoria’s Secret and the French lingerie house Etam and the latest round drew a deep bench beyond Lululemon: SWEN Capital Partners, EQT Ventures, family offices tied to Peugeot and Etam, the largest shareholder of the plastics maker Indorama Ventures, and support from the European Innovation Council. It is a crowded cap table for a materials startup, spanning a French carmaker’s family office, a Sri Lankan factory empire, and a Canadian activewear brand, and it reflects how badly the industry wants a nylon it can actually reuse.
For MAS Holdings, which put money in and also sews garments for many of the world’s biggest labels, the draw is that Syntetica lined up the whole chain at once. “Recycling technology succeeds when brand commitment, manufacturing partnership, and industrial scale-up expertise all converge – and Syntetica is one of the few ventures in this space that has brought all of these together,” Sid Amalean of MAS Holdings said in a statement. “We’re excited to support Syntetica to scale their technology by leveraging MAS’ apparel manufacturing expertise.”
Inside the Michelin plant
Good chemistry still has to survive a factory floor, and Syntetica handed that job to a company that runs them for a living. Its first commercial demonstration plant is going up inside Michelin’s Centre for Sustainable Materials at the tiremaker’s innovation park in Clermont-Ferrand, France, a partnership the two announced in May, with the site aiming for hundreds of tons of recycled pellets a year. Michelin uses nylon in its own tires, and it is bringing the engineering discipline that turns a lab result into a production line. “Installing our pilot at the Centre for Sustainable Materials marks a decisive milestone for Syntetica,” Bertone said when the deal was announced. “The industrial expertise and operational rigour made available by Michelin are a key lever to scale our technology to full industrialisation.”
Michelin frames it as the reason the center exists at all. “The Centre for Sustainable Materials was designed to support this kind of breakthrough technology towards industrial scale,” Patrice Kéfalas, its director, said in a statement. “The collaboration with Syntetica illustrates our ambition to put Michelin’s industrial experience in service of concrete solutions to accelerate materials circularity.”
The plant also has to prove it can handle the messy reality of a returned swimsuit at the volume a brand orders every season, and that answer is still years off. Bertone, for his part, keeps steering the story away from the chemistry and toward the deal-making. “It’s a story of pragmatic industrial partnerships with the right players to get buy-in from the whole value chain,” he said.
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