Fashion is one of the world's most wasteful and costly industries, and customers are more inclined than ever to purchase cheap clothes at fast fashion retailers. But the issue is these garments often get worn a handful of times before being thrown away, creating massive amounts of waste. How can the industry make a change? Peter Majeranowski, President and CEO of Circ, joins Closing Bell to explain how the company's proprietary textile recycling tech creates new garments from old materials, how the company plans to meet its 2030 sustainability goals, and more.

Closing Bell

Circ's Solution to Fashion Waste: Break Down, Reuse, and Recycle Textile Materials

Well, the fashion industry has been one of the slowest to adopt sustainable strategies and consumers are now more than ever likely to shop fast fashion brands due to their low price point. Well, that means the cycle of waste continues with garments often worn a handful of times before being thrown away. Our next guest has a tangible solution search proprietary technology breaking close down to their raw materials and using those to make new items. Well, the idea has attracted major investors, including Zara's parent company, Inditex, as part of a $30 million dollars series B round. So joining me now is Peter Mayakovsky, president and Ceo of Cirque. Peter thanks so much for coming on the show. We love talking sustainability here on closing Bell and cheddar News. So let's start with your technology. How does it work to create a more sustainable option. First of all, thanks for having me, we're really excited to be here. Our technology works kind of like a fancy pressure cooker and that's a little bit of an oversimplification. But basically what it does is we put the end of use textiles into our machine and by adding water temperature pressure and a little bit of responsible chemistry, we're able to break down the polyester And that separates from the cotton. Over 60% of the clothing produced today is a poly cotton blend, which makes it very hard to separate and recycle. So in our process that break down the polyester creates the separation from the cotton, which we then re spin into a new textile and then those polyester monomers or building blocks, which traditionally come from the oil and gas industry were able to re palma rise back into a new Virgin like polyester thread so it can be used to make new clothing again. Okay so is this process itself net positive for the environment? Yes that's a very important point. It wouldn't be worth all this effort if it weren't. Uh We've done several what's called life cycle assessments or L. C. A. S. To confirm that. Yes this is better than Virgin and a net positive for the environment. Now is a company like Zara, Zara's parent company invested in your round. Zara has been known as one of these retailers with fast fashion, very cool designs. Um and actually just constantly feeling that those shelves with new inventory is a company like Zara going to use your service. Yeah, we certainly hope so. And we think they will after their recent investment. And you know, I'd like to think a little bit about fashion 2030 years ago when I remember I'm 45 where it was really a thing for people that had money and uh companies like Inditex has really democratized fashion but now we have this major sustainability Issue. And so technologies like ours that bring circular solutions to the industry I think are the next generation for this industry in order to improve its impact, interesting. So you did raise $30 million Peter. How are you going to use that money to grow? Yeah, there's a lot of money. Uh, and we are on a classic hard tech company meaning it's capital intensive. We're making large machines that can process hundreds of tons of products per day. And so we're using that capital to grow our team, build our engineering muscles, scale our current production so we can launch more products in the, in the market with the brains we're working with and just on net, I know you said net it is positive for the environment, but any sort of metrics peter you can provide as to how positive it is for the climate. Yeah. So I'll refer to our 2030 goal. It's our big hairy, audacious goal of 10, 10, 100 by 2030. We want to recycle 10 billion garments that represents 10% of annual production and that would save 100 million trees and asked what the trees have to do with fashion. But today is an industry, we use about 200 million trees a year to make fibers like Rayon viscose Liesel and we want to protect those trees. They're our best technology right now for greenhouse gas absorption. Is this a hard pitch to companies, Do you find that companies in this space are willing to maybe spend a little bit more money to work with your firm. Yeah. You know, it's remarkable that that that trend has changed a lot, especially the last two years I think unfortunately that's because it's just find a disaster everywhere, But also consumers, especially millennials and gen z are much more aware of their consumption choices. And I like to think fashion is the front cover of our books. It's probably the only artistic thing we do every day, and if it doesn't match our values towards sustainability and protecting our planet, it doesn't work. And at the end of the day, these brands are big marketing companies and they listen to their customers so they are willing to work with us and, and even pay a little more of it. That's what it takes. Peter Karnowski, of course. Like I said, we love any sustainability story here on cheddar news and closing Bell. Peters President Ceo of Cirque. Thank you. Thank you, grab.