Dennis Nobelius: Let's redefine waste
In a bimonthly briefing, Syre CEO Dennis Nobelius gives a candid update on the action and progress taking place inside Syre’s walls, and in the textile industry as a whole. In his first briefing of 2025, Dennis shares his perspectives on the following topics:
- The textile industry must fundamentally shift its perspective on waste – transforming it from an end-of-life burden into a valuable secondary material that can be infinitely recycled.
- Syre's global infrastructure development, from our U.S. Blueprint Plant to the planned gigaplant in Vietnam, demonstrates how industrial-scale circular solutions are not just possible but essential, as our ambitious plans address 3 percent of the global polyester market.
- The demand for collaborative action, from policymakers modernizing waste regulations, to brands committing to long-term volume agreements, to technology partners developing AI-powered sorting solutions. When all work together we can create a truly circular textile economy.
Secondary materials are our raw material – reusing what has already been put out there, over-and-over again, instead of using new raw material dug up from Earth. For me, this is what it means to be circular. We should start talking about virgin raw materials instead of just ”raw materials” to emphasize the needed shift away from virgin materials. This puts some tough demands on us who are bringing forward circular polyester, because what we produce needs to be of the same quality as virgin, petrol-based, polyester and possible to reuse over-and-over again. This is where PET bottles fail when they are “recycled” into a textile fiber, shifting away from a truly circular system where used bottles can become new bottles in an endless loop, instead of becoming textile fibers with an end station.
Legislation is key for a circular transformation, but it puts a lot of demands on our legislation, our export/import system, on our textile sorting and collecting within and across nations, and our joint capabilities to scale together as one ecosystem. Simply put, just being able to handle the vast amount of textile waste out there.
In December, together with my colleague Stina Billinger, our chair Susanna Campbell, and Carl-Erik Lagercrantz from Vargas, I had the pleasure of meeting Jessika Roswall, the new European Commissioner of Circular Economy. Appointing a leader accountable for driving the circular economy forward is a great sign. We updated each other on the need to keep pushing the EU sustainability agenda and that there are ambitious companies here to make business and sustainability meet. The EU is in the global lead here, implementing the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), the EU Green Claim Directive and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) aiming at calling out material and sources for what they are, to basically avoid labels from greenwashing. As of January 1st, in all EU member states, it’s now mandatory to collect and sort textile waste. Which is great, but a lot more still needs to be put in place (guidelines, carrots and sticks, technology).The opportunity to create a new green industry within EU, at scale, is here.
There is also an export waste directive aiming to stop the Global North from shipping textile waste to the Global South, which is happening today. The global flow of textiles back and forth is really crazy.
Textile waste needs to be redefined, and the devil’s in the details. One item we brought up with Jessika Roswall is the need to define textile waste, so we don’t destroy a potential new green industry.
For example, textile waste should cease to be defined as “waste” when we or other industry players have transformed it into PET chips. Because in this shape, the new circular material is now ready for yarn spinning into apparel, home textiles, airbags or seatbelts, and more.
Similar dialogues are taking place across the globe, from California to Vietnam. Circular is the new black. Another example, in Vietnam (and many countries), the import of textile waste has been banned—an attempt at keeping waste at bay. Now though, with modern technology happening, the closed circle imports of textile waste is nothing else than importing secondary material, or raw material, and can be seen as importing steel or any other material.
Another dilemma: in the strive to attack textile waste we can also go wrong at the very start. For example, to establish larger industries within the EU region, there is simply not enough post-consumer sorted waste available at this point. But combined with post-industrial waste there is. And the aspect of post-industrial waste is also relevant, today most of this is also to a large scale incinerated (energy recovery). And the post-industrial waste is not going away either, for example, the waste in the production of an airbag is close to 20 percent despite efforts in minimizing it. The same goes for apparel, where vast amounts of waste are generated in the cutting of fabrics (see image above). Hence, for a number of years and reasons, both post-consumer waste and post-industrial waste need to be allowed for and be contained in the definition of recycled content.
To establish this new ecosystem, collecting and sorting needs new technology. Here, to move to action we have needed to actively search, develop, and recommend technology solutions to enable quality assurance and sorting out at the many hundreds of sorting partners we are establishing. AI anyone? Yes, we are to provide large amount of data from our lab to feed neural networks related to, for example, handheld near-infrared devices that are needed at our sorting partners sites to be able to identify the material and chemical compositions of textile waste fast—from elastane, nylon, cotton and polyester to titanium dioxide, PFAS, silicon and more.
At our receiving end, we will likely need to x-ray the bales of textile raw material (to avoid unintentional metal, for example) and to map the amount of water in the bales.
We are global from day one. This is what we shared as our ambition and our approach at Syre, and it means that we today have employees based in Germany, Denmark, the U.S. (mid, east- and west coast), Vietnam, China, and Sweden. And we’re planning to expand further. Our partners are also across the world, ranging from Turkey, the U.S, Chile, India, Vietnam, and beyond.
This puts requirements on us as an organization, to work across the globe as one team with local nuances. It also puts some strain on the travelling budgets and emissions, noting the value of interacting in person to be effective remotely. This week, we’re running workshops regarding our technology in general, our pilot line in Mebane, NC, and regarding our ramp up plans in our Blueprint plant with Selenis in Cedar Creek, NC.
The workshops are also supported by external experts joining in, all with full transparency and to support the mission. I have also decided to stay on and use our U.S. site as base for the coming four weeks. This is where it happens and the most critical place to be right now. In parallel, we are gearing up for the Vietnam gigaplant-to-be and have now scouted two sites in two different provinces as the most promising ones (green energy, good basis). And we are working with the authorities to adapt legislations to enable textile waste / secondary material import to the plant to enable the scale and impact, creating a Global Hub for circular textiles.
Action speaks louder than words, and we’re certainly taking huge steps with our pilot line, Blueprint plant and gigaplant. That said, I got one comment some time back that we are going for such a huge scale, but actually, we need more companies pursuing similar scale—the size of the problem is simply that big. Our outspoken ambitions are the biggest to date but still only addressing around 3 percent of the global polyester market, hence, I keep repeating my statement, for companies like us to happen and to be “investable”. Brands of the world would need to support us by future-proofing their supply and to commit to long-term volumes. If not, these companies will not happen.
As for polyester, the demand is surging and hence there is zero demand-risk in moving to circular polyester as forecasted in the future. And we have more to share within short regarding some early movers on the brand-side, supporting the shift to a circular economy. Thanks in advance on building a new business and closing the loop, moving from a linear to a circular business model.
Stay tuned for exciting updates to come,
Dennis Nobelius