08-05-2025
If You Build It, Will They Come? How Material Innovators Decide Where to Break Commercial Ground.
Syre has picked its first commercial site.
While the H&M Group-backed 'circular' polyester manufacturer is already in the middle of constructing a 10,000-metric-ton blueprint plant in Cedar Creek in North Carolina, where its textile-to-textile recycling technology was first honed, Syre was always thinking big—and bigger.
More from Sourcing Journal
Material World: Is Lunaform Ready to Wear? Yes. Ready to Scale? Also Yes.
Uncaged Innovation Invites Designers to Elevate the Future
Material World: Circ Secures 5-Year Partner, Sodra's Tannin Arms Call
On Friday, the Stockholm-headquartered firm announced that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with the northern Vietnamese province of Binh Dinh—the first step in raising from the ground a $700 million-$1 billion 'gigascale' factory capable of pumping out up to 250,000 metric tons of PET chips for spinning into yarn. The idea is to create a network of 12 setups worldwide that would collectively pump out more than 3 million metric tons of the same within a decade, reducing the fashion industry's reliance on both virgin polyester and its bottle-to-textile recycled alternative.
Syre had narrowed down the options to two industrial parks that would be able to supply the renewable energy it desired: one near Ocean City in Hanoi that is replete with solar farms and the other in the Nhon Hoi Economic Zone near the coast in Binh Dinh, where windmills are in abundance.
But Vietnam is also smack dab in the middle of the broader textile industry in Southeast Asia, 'so you have the natural value chain of the textile industry in that region,' said CEO Dennis Nobelius. 'When you speak with the bigger brands about where they would like to see the plant, Vietnam comes up quite quickly and quite high on that list.'
While Syre and other innovators in the textile-to-textile recycled polyester space —think the likes of Ambercycle, Circ and Reju—all have ambitions of eventual world domination, which is necessary to cut down on the time, cost and emissions it'll take to ship things around, nailing that first location is crucial because it informs everything that follows.
But it also isn't easy to figure out. Most of the clothing waste that will serve as their feedstock hails from the global North. The mills and factories that would take Syre or Circ's chips, repolymerize them into polyester threads that are then spun into yarn for weaving or knitting into fabric, are in the global South, mainly in Asia. So are the cut-and-sew facilities that would turn them into new garments, restarting the cycle.
'Site selection almost makes my head explode, because it's like building a bridge,' said Shay Sethi, CEO of Ambercycle, which is based in Los Angeles. 'There are so many ways to build a bridge, but at the end of the day, a bridge has to be built. I also think there's no real wrong answer. There are pros and cons to every location.'
Ambercycle plans to start constructing its first plant this year, though many things, such as size and product volumes, are still TBD, at least publicly. But the factory will likely be situated somewhere in the Asia-Pacific region, with initial production poised to begin circa 2027. While Europe and North America may have a lot of government grant programs, Sethi and Moby Ahmed, his co-founder, haven't been able to find a single example of a materials company that found success with any of them. And despite President Donald Trump's tariff-fueled efforts to reshore manufacturing in the United States, the large bulk of apparel is still made overseas, making Asia a more attractive location.
But Sethi and Ahmed, who are both of South Asian descent, feel most comfortable doing business in Asia, which Sethi said might be the most important consideration of all. But even then, there can be complications. If they build in India, for instance, would Ahmed, who is Pakistani, be able to obtain a visa to enter the country? If they pick Pakistan, would Sethi have trouble because he is of Indian heritage? And when the plant gets built, will there be enough capacity—not to mention the right personnel—to deliver and manage Ambercycle's chemistry at scale?
The location's accessibility is also something that needs to be weighed. Sethi looked at a site that was perfect except that it was in the middle of nowhere, which meant it would be difficult for brands and retailers to visit the factory without getting into the business of paving roads and building a landing strip. And since some Ambercycle staffers would be relocating from Los Angeles, another question that is frequently batted around is whether they can see themselves living there.
'It's really easy to make a decision from an Excel spreadsheet, but it's totally different when you're at these sites talking to people that you're working with that are from that region,' Sethi said. 'I guess the Ambercycle culture has always been, you know, we really take our time and try and understand everything before we say, 'O.K., this is what we're going to do. This is how we're going to do it.' And then if one thing works, then you could do another thing and then another thing.'
That each country has its own idiosyncrasies—regulatory and otherwise—that can throw additional wrenches. Bangladesh and Vietnam, for instance, don't allow used clothing imports. One of Syre's potential challenges with Vietnam is that domestic demand can only supply 10 percent of the upward of 300,000 metric tons of post-consumer material that it will need to keep its machines churning. Syre and the Vietnamese government plan to pilot a mechanism that gives the company the license to bring in textiles from surrounding countries.
'That, along with the green energy, is a key criterion,' Nobelius said. 'If those can't be provided, we would probably have to look at a different country. But we're trying to make clear that we are in a different mode or industry. There is no fear of bringing in used clothing and dumping or re-selling it.'
Like Ambercycle, Circ is getting closer to revealing its first site, likely within the next few months. There will probably be a Plan A and a Plan B, 'just in case something goes wrong with the first,' said Luke Henning, the Virginia-based company's chief commercial officer. In both cases, what's paramount is whether the site is technically viable, which also incidentally makes it financeable. Is there enough land? What will logistics look like?
'Because logistics can kill you,' said Henning, drawing from his previous experience working with biofuels. 'For example, corn is superexpensive in the Carolinas but supercheap in the Midwest. It is cheaper to get corn into the Carolinas from South America than it is from Ohio because the rail links there are so expensive that it's cheaper to send it by boat. But you can't send it in by boat from an American port to an American port because it's too expensive, so you literally have to import it.'
For Henning, then, the question of proximity is not as important as the logistics options that are available, with shipping generally being the least expensive and most efficient, followed by rail and road. And that goes both in and out, since the factory would then want to send its output, whether chips or thread or yarn, to the next producer and then the next. In a perfect scenario, an innovator would have ready and easy logistical access to both the raw material and to its fiber producers. Because that is rarely the case, the next best thing is to only freight goods with the highest value density.
'Ideally want to be closer to the waste in some way, just because that tends to be the thing you want to ship the least distance because it has the lowest value,' he said. 'So your logistics adds a higher proportional cost onto feedstock than it does onto the output.'
All that ties into the investability of the project. Certain venture capital funds might have a geographical mandate to only spend money within the United States or Europe. Other investors might have concerns about the political stability of a location or its legal environment. Even if some funds have the ability to make exceptions, 'then you've just made your life harder because you're seeking an exception from their established mandate,' Henning said.
'It depends on what your end goal or end game is,' said Patrik Fisk, CEO of French 'materials regeneration' company Reju, which is beginning with textile-to-textile recycled polyester, or simply Reju polyester, before it explores other materials like cotton or nylon. Reju's Frankfurt demonstration plant is already up and running. Its next act is establishing two 'megafactories,' one in the United States and one elsewhere in Europe, that can generate 100,000 metric tons of polymer apiece.
It's partly because those geographies are seemingly endless wellsprings of textile waste that Reju wants to use those initial sites to make a statement about why fashion's linear system of take-make-dispose needs to change. The availability of green energy and water for its steam-dependent chemical processes is another factor, as is the infrastructure for the advanced chemistry that it dabbles in. Where all the 'stars align' becomes fairly limited all things considered, Fisk said. Despite pockets of progress in Asia, for instance, many countries—Vietnam included—are still highly reliant on coal.
'The other thing we should ask ourselves is, where do you want to take care of the waste?' he said. 'So are you attempting to ship the waste to Asia, make your stuff there and then ship the garments back? Or are you actually trying to solve two things at once? Which is taking care of the post-consumer waste in the region and making it into a new product in the region?'
All that might be moot in a matter of years. Eventually, Reju envisions at least 20 megafactories dotted across the globe, allowing it to seize a potential market share of roughly 25 percent of textile-to-textile recycled materials.
'It takes three years to build one unit, and one unit isn't going to be enough for even one brand,' Fisk said. 'So let's start somewhere where we can also control and make sure that we are proving out the model of circularity before we start trying to make this into a commodity. This will not be a commodity coming out of the gate. This is going to be a new product coming out of the gate.'
