Plastic recycling has fallen short. Only about 9% of all plastic is recycled globally, which sounds pretty bad until you compare it with textiles. Only 0.5% of those are recycled.
One of the biggest challenges is that textiles are seldom one material. Buttons and zippers complicate matters, but spandex is even worse. Novel synthetic blends have made for clothing that’s a dream to wear but a nightmare to recycle.
“The challenge to recycling is that you can never predict your waste,” Stwart Peña Feliz, co-founder and CEO of MacroCycle, told TechCrunch. “Your waste has infinite number of contaminants.”
MacroCycle has developed a shortcut, of sorts, that promises to make recycled plastic as inexpensive as virgin material.
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