Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ

Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Roz. So there's enough material in the cloth we throw away to keep making more clothes for decades. The fashion industry alone dumps 92 million tons of textile waste a year. And all of that cotton polyester is recyclable. It can all be used to make brand new clothing. This phenomenon struck Peter Majoranowski as a problem looking for a solution.

Peter founded a company called Circ. It's developed patented technology that can recycle polycotton, which is what the majority of our clothes are made from. And he's already partnering with some of the biggest names in apparel to try and reduce all of that waste. Peter actually started out his career in the Navy back in 1998, where he served on ships in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. I was on board a cruiser on its way into the Arabian Gulf.

uh quite a time to be in the service. Uh we immediately suspected it was Osama bin Laden and we were uh instead of continuing on uh into the Arabian Gulf, we stayed right where we were off the coast of Pakistan and participated in the response. So I had Really first row, uh front row seats to the conflict. Oh wow.

Um and then of course it would go on into Iraq and uh after Afghanistan, Iraq. Um and so W what tell me a little bit about some of the things that you did. Were you, um you were also deployed for the Iraq war also on ship or Or on land. On land actually. Um and the first person I met when I entered Iraq was at that time uh general Petraeus and he said, What is a sailor doing in the middle of the desert?

And as the Iraq war was was getting underway, they really needed support. um in terms of analysis on the private sector that existed and how that could be utilized in a post Saddam Iraq to help reconstruct the country. And so I was writing a lot of white papers. uh in the Pentagon and then I was tapped to actually go over to Iraq and support various missions.

Hm. So you w when did you wrap up your your naval career? I wrapped up active duty in two thousand four. So two thousand four, um, and you went I guess you went on to work for um like a from whatever a defence industry management firm, but is it w was it like um an investment firm or

Yes. Uh it was a small group. investing in mainly new NATO countries that were soon to join the EU. Uh so these would be countries like uh Romania or Bulgaria. Um, where it was still very

Emerging markets with a lot of opportunity. And I was excited to go there. Uh my my Pentagon boss uh was a civilian. um had a lot of experience in those markets and so we went there to uh invest US dollars into these emerging opportunities. And for me I already got a bug for for business and how Enterprise can move

economies and move move countries, uh, and I was very interested in that. And so for for me, Eastern Europe was a great place to to cut my teeth. And really Take on a lot of tasks. Alright, so you

Um you decide. in two thousand nine to go back to school, get an MBA. And and was Tell me what your your thinking was that that you would get an MBA and Maybe start a business?

Yeah. Um you know, what we were doing already in Eastern Europe was pretty entrepreneurial, but I Felt that I could use more sophisticated tools and just be better. And I wanted to expand my network. And so it felt like a logical next step for me. Yeah.

So you so you start that program, you get your MBA, and I guess Um Sometime after that you you would meet this guy, um Hilary Kaprowski, who was a a very famous immunologist, he was involved in a polio vaccine and and and he was um

I guess he was running a biotech. foundation or he was running a a company, a lab. And He Talk to you about an idea he had. Can you tell me about

About that meeting and What came out of that. Yeah, Hillary actually is uh old family friend. My my father Went to

um medical school with Hillary in in Warsaw until the the war broke out and my father had to escape and they reconnected after the war. This is World War Two, you're talking about. World War Two, yeah. And so I was just visiting him having dinner at his house and he was talking to me about his foundation and the research they were doing in in plant sciences specifically, his vision was to use plants as a vehicle for for vaccines to develop vaccines, grow vaccines. And he was really frustrated with the uptake uh from the FDA and other sources. So he started applying that know how to look at industrial applications. And over dinner he told me that he just had a patent granted

And a lot of press around an engineered non-smoking tobacco plant that could be used for biofuels. Wow. Okay. So so Hillary had this idea to use tobacco plants to make biofuel and even got a patent for that technology and and presumably that idea really grabbed your attention because uh because of your time you spent working on fuel tankers in the Navy is that Is it right?

Yeah. One of my first jobs in the Navy, I was boarding ships smuggling oil out of Iraq against UN sanctions. And we'd usually have to sit on those ships after we we intercepted them for eighteen hours at a time. So I had a lot of time to think. About the geopolitical nature of energy and oil and and that really ignited a a passion inside of me to to look at alternative fuels and how amazing it would be if you could democratize energy. uh take these large poker chips away from bad actors around the world. I mean we're still seeing this today in Europe uh with the war in Ukraine and so

When he mentioned that to me and it would happen to be uh during this global recession where I was not active anymore, I thought this is something I could really dig my teeth into. And so The next thing we know, we're we're starting what's now Circ, but at that time was called Titan Biosciences. And and this was to turn tobacco into A fuel source like um like biofuels for airplanes?

Exactly. maybe more like cars and trucks. Um we were specifically targeting ethanol and biodiesel. And doing it with a crop that is not is not a food crop and can grow almost anywhere in the world. And and right, because the uh obviously p bio biofuels are made generally made from corn, right? And um so yeah, tobacco, I mean it's it's odd. What what is it about tobacco

That makes it a good um A good source. For this fuel. Yeah, this is not a typical tobacco plant. Uh they grow really large. We we treated them differently. We grew more per acre. And we would uh what was was good about it is that tobacco grows in over a hundred countries around the world. Um and we could get

Good yields per acre. Yeah, I mean and and let's just talk about the process for a moment. I mean it was a uh a hydrothermal process. So can you kind of explain h how that worked? Like you chop up you would Basically process Dry leaves or I don't know, you took

the tobacco plant and did you dry it like they do for cigars or Yeah, no not nothing like that. Um we would harvest it fresh. Uh we were using uh combines to do it, um chop it up. uh the juices when you harvest it were we would press out because those already had high amounts of sugar that we could extract for fermenting into ethanol. And the remaining biomass we put through this hydrothermal process. where we could use water to act like molecular scissors basically to cut down the cellulose into glucose and extract the oil. So you're basically mechanically doing what? what nature naturally does. Like w the the the oil we use today are plants, or plants millions of years ago, right? Animals and plants.

And uh and so you're essentially doing that, but in a much more expedited way. Applying pressure to create A fuel. Exactly. Yeah, we're where it's a time machine for nature.

Hm. So Cool idea. And y you'd been in in in you know, in the Navy, so you knew that there was a lot of interest in biofuels. Um but what what was the challenge you had? I mean you y you know, I I I I've read that you had a ha hard time raising money, but but why? What was the You know,'cause you started this in twenty twelve.

Um but why Why couldn't you attract any Any investors. What I can now see in retrospect is there's so many compounding risk factors. Um, you had to find farmers willing to grow it. You had to deal with a plant that didn't have any other application. And also the timing was was pretty bad. There was a lot of big failures. in biofuels in general. And so a lot of the investment community, the venture funds, said, look, we we can't, our hands are tight, even if we wanted to.

We're not permitted to invest any more in biofuels. And so it was a scary time. We we could see as I say the end of the earth are a runway uh getting smaller and smaller and we had to quickly Scramble to find new applications. But you had this process that you that you are working on. I mean and and so h by the way, how are you financing the process with no investment capital?

We uh we were creative. Uh uh joke we make one plus one equal five all the time. But we did have some investment from from individuals, uh high net worth individuals. And we had uh millions of dollars of grants from the Virginia Tobacco Commission, for example. So that allowed us to develop this technology, which is now the bedrock of Circ. Right. From what I understand, you were essentially turning the pulpit.

From tobacco stocks to paper. Yeah, that was one of the iterations. Uh great great research there. Um yeah, we we were looking at just continuing with tobacco. And so we looked at how to apply that hydrothermal know-how to make non-tree pulp for packaging paper. You name it. And it turns out the highest or one of the highest qualities of pulp or cellulose goes into clothing, about three hundred million trees a year. And that's when a Swedish uh trading company they traded primarily in paper and pulp, but they also had a recycling business. And they were the ones that s suggested we try running

uh some old t shirts to our process to see if we could recover anything. And it worked. We're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, Peter changes course, transforming his biofuel company into one that recycles textiles. Stay with us, I'm Guy Roz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guest today is Peter Majoranowski, who back in 2016 discovered a way to break down and reuse cotton and polyester. So okay, so you

You start experimenting with this and you see that it's successful, you can actually take a sh a shirt And you can You can actually shred it up and and and what? I mean, they didn't just want like a a s a bag stuffed with like shredded cotton. What did you give them? What did you deliver to them? We gave them a high purity cellulose or a high purity pulp. That could go at the very beginning of the supply chain to make

Fibers like viscos, rayon, or Lyosel. So we had two streams coming out of our process. We had the the the high purity cellulose or pulp, but we also had the building blocks of polyester, which traditionally come from oil and gas industry. Alright, so Well once you

I mean, did was it clear at that point that You were gonna pivot away from biofuels and tobacco? Not quite. We We're trying a bunch of things. Uh we were throwing basically spaghetti against the wall to see what would stick so we could continue on as a company.

And when we figured out the The textile recycling. We didn't Honestly. think it was solving a big problem. We didn't know at the time. And then we started immediately researching things to to Google and other resources and saw that it w was a really big problem. Because obviously

The fashion industry accounts for a significant percentage of carbon emissions and pollution wa you know in in rivers and and oceans, I think to twenty percent of the world's wastewater uh comes from, you know Uh the fashion industry. And then Uh just a a small percentage of clothing is recycled. So

You were being contacted by manufacturers who were like how do we get How do we use more recycled materials in our clothing? By manufacturers, but also brands. Um one of our first cold calls was from Patagonia.

And they have a take back program where you can come in in with a Patagonia garment that's used, it doesn't matter how old it'll give you some value for it and then they try to resell it. Um or they'll even try to repair it to resell it. But if they can't repair it and resell it They've been warehousing it. And so they had this big problem of warehouses full of

of end of use clothing that needed to be recycled. And so that was what drove that phone call. Yeah. So okay, so you were contacted by Patagonia first and then eventually others, and they wanted to know Can we do this at scale? So I have to imagine

Um To do it at scale you had to raise So really raise serious money to make that happen. Serious, serious money. Yeah. A lot of people wanted to know when when they could start sending truckloads, when they could start buying recycled material. And uh and we're still on that path.

Uh yeah, it it is very capital intensive. We're talking about significant chemical engineering processes. So let's talk about how This works. Um Just a a small percentage of clothing is recycled. Less than one percent. Less than one percent globally. The idea is let's figure out how we can get

More stuff to you guys. So you can Let's talk about your process first. I think most of the T shirts come in or the c articles of clothing that come in are Polycotton. So they're like a a combination of cotton and polyester, right? That's right.

Okay, and then You essentially are doing what with that article of clothing? So we shred it. Put it through our process. That strips out the dyes and other finishing chemistry.

And what we're left is with a very high purity Cotton cellulose. And those polyester building blocks that can be used for making new clothing. So you can take a T shirt, a polycotton shirt. Put it through your

process is hydrothermal reactions basically pressure Water heat. But then how do you separate the cotton from the polyester in that shirt? There it's all intertwined. That's right. Um, that's the beauty of it. When you reverse the reaction of making polyester, you're breaking it down to its original building blocks. And those building blocks.

dissolve into water. So essentially you're dissolving away the polyester and also separating it away from the cotton. So now you have a solid stream with the cotton and a liquid stream with the polyester building blocks. Wow. Alright, so you you you basically can take a polycotton t shirt and basic essentially melt away the plastic, the polyester You're left with with white cotton'cause you've removed the dyes.

Uh and It gets shredded up and then that can essentially be turned into thread to make new t shirts. Exactly. How many cycles can uh a a piece of clothing go through?

before you can't recycle it any any longer. Yeah, so um whenever you have a Uh chemical engineering process, you always have a little bit of loss from just material handling and things like that. But The polyester can get repolymerized and unpolymerized, you know, back and forth.

Essentially infinitely. I remember when when My Um my children were babies. we decided to use uh cotton for them'cause I I just hate the idea of throwing away diapers and just seeing piles of

Just you know. Diapers in a landfill. So we got out of service, they'd pick up cotton diapers every week and then bring back fresh cotton diapers. It was great. But still it was w it's water intensive, it requires a lot of bleach. Right, and the service was was doing that. I have to imagine this.

process still requires a lot of water. It does, but we recycle over ninety percent of it back into the beginning of the process. Hm. How do you do that? A lot of chemical engineering, a lot of um water treatment. Um we're doing uh filtration steps to remove the dyes and other finishing chemistry so that we can then

Use that water again. Huh. Alright, so Essentially Um

There is uh I I think I'm I'm I'm right in saying this, there is more than enough clothing in the world. Two uh continue to recycle and to continue make new clothing. Is that right that the premise is Today there there there are enough pieces of clothing

That are not recycled. That if they were recycled. We could just use that. We wouldn't have to make we'dn't have to get virgin cotton or Or virgin plastic. Absolutely.

We believe we have all the clothes to make all the clothes we'll ever need. And when you look at the the scale of this industry, it's massive. a lot of it ends up in landfill within a year or two. And so There's a lot of material there that is in a linear system that really should be recirculated so we can continue to use those resources. We're gonna take another quick break, but when we come back, how Peter turned polycotton recycling into a growing business and his thoughts on fashion's looming reckoning with sustainability. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest today is Peter Major Nowsky, co-founder and CEO of Circ. Okay, so now Um you've got the technology down, and you've got brands, I believe Zara For example, is already you know, working with you and it's already already has a

from uh recycled material. T tell me a little bit about how you source all of the clothing because as you say only one percent of clothing in the world is recycled, so

Is it Yeah, you know, when you go into a Zara or an H and M, I think a lot of'em have like Where you can You can just drop things off. But that's still just a fraction.

Where are you getting? Where are you getting this stuff from? A combination of sources and Unfortunately for the planet, uh, but fortunately for business there's no lack of input material.

Um, we get a lot of material from cut and sew factories. To make a shirt, it takes about another shirt worth of waste along that whole supply chain to to produce it. And most of it is that that final step when you're cutting. Discarding just discarding the the the textiles from which you're not using the T shirt. Exactly. About fifteen percent hits the factory floor. And so that's a a very good source uh for for waste as other solutions are scaling in terms of

How do we collect from households sort and get those to to providers or recyclers like us. Um There's also a whole nother class. There's there's uniform companies, for example, that

process a lot of uniforms. They're essentially big laundries. They're constantly washing things. Yeah. And there's a s significant amount that can't be put back into use and they're landfilling that right now. Uh also hospitals use a lot of textiles. Um law enforcement uses a lot of textiles. Universities do. So those are all great sources of of post consumer waste. That doesn't necessarily have to come from a household. I mean, it seems like that's but that seems like another business entirely. We had Terracycle on the show a couple weeks ago and they

obviously um have a really robust um you know network of uh But you guys are processing it. You can't also

At least for now, also Collect it. So how do you You get people to send you stuff, how do you get these factories to send you stuff, how do you build partnerships

How are you doing it? Yeah, we are uh attacking that problem from a a couple of angles. We are working with People that are just focused on the collection and aggregation of waste. We're working directly with factories that have waste.

when we work with brands, uh you mentioned Zara, for example. We also asked them about their waste and about their factories and to uh to direct us to those factories or to direct those factories to give us their waste. So Um So that that's been somewhat effective right now, but I think

There's still a opportunity here. The circular ecosystem has opportunities all over the place. So um Tell me a little bit about how you

we're able to sort of scale it up. And presumably I know you raise some money from a you know Over time. from different venture funds, including Bill Gates' venture fund. I think you've raised now Uh something like Uh over forty million dollars, is that about is that about right? Yeah.

Wow. Okay. And and tell me about the facility that you built. Yeah, so we are at a commercial pilot scale, um, at about five tons per day, um, in Springfield, Ohio, and in Danville, Virginia. And we are doing that with

engineering partners that provide equipment and and other solutions to various industries. And that's how we've been able to uh build our s and scale our solution very quickly. But the bulk of the funds we've recently raised are going towards the engineering and planning for our first really large scale integrated facility.

And that would process about sixty five thousand tons per year. So how much um capacity d do you expect to have? to be able to like it I don't know I I don't know if you can quantify in a way that's easy to understand. So like tons or like I don't know, like A million T shirts a month or I don't know.

D w yeah, where where are you now? Yeah, so we are um you could say roughly uh fifteen thousand, twenty thousand garments a day uh current scale. So something more about two hundred fifty thousand garments a day. So and and how long does it take to process one? Just seconds?

Yes, it it happens very, very quickly. Um From and it's a continuous process too. So we're now doing it in a continuous way, but the from end to end, it's about fifteen minutes. Wow. So you guys teamed up with Zara. earlier this year and um

And you've released have you released this line? Yet. We did. It was a four piece collection. We released back in May, uh, during design week in Milan. It was the world's first collection made from polycotton waste. Entirely from polycon waste.

And you're you're you're label is sewn in along alongside the Zara label. Yeah, I should also say they're investors. Uh we were their first Technology investment.

And they've been fantastic partners to to work with and it's not common for a brand to share that. Key real estate on a on a garment with another company. And so We were very proud that they

They agreed to put our name there. Yeah. So so give me a sense of where you where you guys are headed. I mean I mean, right now you've got a partnership with Sara and and they're an investor as well. And and do you have other partnerships in the works and and and what are you hoping to accomplish through those partnerships? We have uh partnerships with various brands. Some of them, of course, are investors, like like Patagonians are uh Um Avi Denison is another one, Zelando in Europe.

Um, and we have a Calendars. set out for several more product releases. And those product releases are really important because They help us educate. consumers, as you mentioned, w we're buying this stuff.

and we're feeding this this industry. And I think it's for so many reasons. I mean clothing is such a a personal thing. I like to say it's the only artistic thing most people do every day. And when it doesn't match your values, that's a that's a challenge. And so That reckoning is is starting to happen now in the industry for for clothing.

Hm. Um Do you I mean As I mentioned earlier, the

The fashion is a huge Uh and I'm not you know, I don't mean to to sort of single them out'cause I ever all of us are responsible. We buy the clothing and we wear it. And the fashion is. Serving human consumers who are buying their products, especially fast fashion brands.

uh are are some of the worst um offenders. And again, not them, us as consumers, because we support we support those Those practices. Um But I mean if in fact The companies are

you know, are using a hundred percent recycled material to produce Uh you know. Articles of clothing.

I have to assume there's still there's still problems though, right? I mean they'cause they're still dyeing the clothing. They're still producing wastewater, for example. Like I mean, they may not be m using virgin plastic or cotton, but there are still challenges that they We'll have to resolve. Absolutely. I I think

most people don't know who makes their clothing, how it's made, where it's Where it comes from. Including fashion executives. And so that's a that's a big big Big challenge. And so We're starting with with non virgin materials is is just the beginning. You also have to think about labor.

Water usage. Die your total life cycle assessment, which is a a term of art for how much uh greenhouse gas emissions, your your You're producing.

And so it's a really three sixty problem that that has to be solved. So give me a sense of where I mean w where you think this is headed. I mean, obviously you're not you know, I can't speak for Patagonia or Tsara or some of your other investors, but I'm assuming they want a significant percentage, if not all of their clothing to be recycled.

I mean at the current How much of their inventory do you think could be recycled material.

Uh in like Five or ten years from now. Yeah, well I in the text, the parent of Zara just put out their targets where they want to have forty percent of their Clothing made from recycled sources, an additional twenty five percent from next generation materials, which

We would Fall in both categories. And you also have regulation uh coming. Um, you know, now you have this this huge industry That's super optimized. That

has to to fix itself and has largely been unregulated. Um and I look at the paper recycling industry as a is a great example from nineteen ninety to two thousand. That industry added 60 million tons a year of annual capacity the following decade another 70 million tons of annual capacity for a total of 130 million tons. And that's right on the same order of magnitude as what we're doing today with textiles. And so I think this this

very old and optimized industry can be transformed in twenty years. And there's a lot of capital out there and a lot of traditional ways of doing things that we need to to disrupt. Pete, thank you so much. Thank you.

That's Peter Majornowski, co-founder and CEO of Circ. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show and it's totally free. This episode was produced by Carla Esteves and edited by John Isabella with research help from JC Howard. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablui. Our audio engineer was James Willitz. Our production team includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Chris Massini, Elaine Coates, Ramel Wood, Sam Paulson, and Carrie Thompson.

Eva Grant is our supervising editor. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to how I built this.

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