Google is investing an undisclosed sum in Energy Dome, a startup developer of long-duration battery technology that pairs with solar, wind and other intermittent renewable sources to provide clean power around the clock.

Energy Dome’s CO2 Battery uses liquid carbon dioxide to store electricity as it is generated. When the power source shuts off, the gas expands, running turbines to release energy to the grid. The initial edition of the technology can dispatch 20 megawatts for up to 10 hours. A future version would provide five times that capacity, according to the company’s founder and CEO, Claudio Spadacini. 

Google plans to support “multiple” commercial deployments of Energy Dome’s technology — already being used commercially in Sardinia, Italy — the company said in a July 25 blog post. Generally, these installations would be sited near solar and wind facilities. “Solar is very suitable and quite predictable,” said Spadacini.

Google didn’t disclose the locations that would be touched by the new partnership, and it declined further comment about terms of the relationship. 

Strong commercial potential

“Long-duration energy storage has the potential to commercialize much faster than some of the other advanced clean energy technologies in our portfolio,” said Google energy strategists Ainhoa Anda and Michelle Chang in the blog. “This means we can use it in the near term to help the electricity system grow more flexibly and reliably, alongside other tools we’re developing, such as data center demand response.”

Energy storage deployments are expected to grow 35 percent for 2025, with a projected 94 gigawatts of additional capacity, according to researcher BloombergNEF. Currently, the most dominant technology for stationary applications related to renewable energy are lithium-ion chemistries.

The price of that technology is appropriate for applications requiring less than four hours of backup electricity during peak demand hours but is tougher to justify for long-duration applications, said Sam Jaffe, principal analyst at consulting firm 1019 Technologies. The artificial intelligence buildout offers one compelling use case.  

“The data center boom is coming, and that is an ideal application for longer duration storage paired with solar,” said Jaffe. “You could do a completely renewable data center that way.”

Innovation: Using CO2 to reduce CO2

Energy Dome’s technology involves a tent-like structure resembling an enclosed sports center that needs a lot of space: 10 acres for the small version of the battery. Still, that’s less than 10 percent of the space in a typical solar-plus-storage installation, Spadacini said. 

Competitive approaches include flow batteries, which use electrolytes to offer increased capacity, hydrogen fuel cells and pumped hydropower. The U.S., for example, has at least 100 gigawatts of pumped hydro, much of it located next to nuclear sites. 

One advantage of Energy Dome’s technology is the well-established supply chain of equipment for liquid CO2. “We are not dependent on made-in-China products,” said Spadacini. That makes the technology eligible for some of the incentives offered under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. 

One challenge will be making sure that Energy Dome’s systems are kept leak-free. “CO2 is a very small molecule and will want to escape,” Jaffe said.

The backstory

Energy Dome was founded in 2019 with seed funding. The Italian startup announced an $11 million Series A raise from 360 Capital and Barclay’s in November 2021, and has raised more than $135 million in all.

The company employs about 90 people, with a small U.S. office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founder Spadacini, a mechanical engineer and serial entrepreneur, has also been involved with startups focused on biogas and geothermal applications.

Google is Energy Dome’s first publicly announced corporate contract. Engie is the startup’s partner in Italy. The company’s first U.S. contract is with utility Alliant Energy, which plans to use Energy Dome’s technology for a storage project that can keep 18,000 Wisconsin homes online for up to 10 hours.

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Kids wear out onesies, footed PJs and T-shirts at an exhausting rate. (For parents, anyway.) And like most of fashion, children’s clothing hasn’t typically featured the circular economy staples of durability, reuse and recycling. 

But with the industry facing a sustainability reckoning — and big brands having been slow to capitalize on expectations that used children’s apparel sales will grow 11 times faster than fashion overall — Carter’s, H&M Group and Gap Inc. are taking varied approaches to address the waste, chemicals and carbon footprints of their kidswear.

They’re doing so in a fast-expanding ecosystem fueled by increasingly concerned parents:

• Global sustainable fashion sales are expected to grow 9.5 percent annually through 2033, according to Business Research Insights, reaching $20.84 billion.
• In the U.S., recent state regulations have banned toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), used for stain- and water-resistance in apparel.
• Hundreds of boutique children’s brands now put sustainability at the top of their sales pitches.
• Three-fourths of parents say they would pay more for sustainable products, according to the 2023 Business of Sustainability Index.
• More than one-third of parents plans to buy back-to-school products with sustainability attributes for their kids, according to a 2024 Deloitte survey.

That said, few consumers will pay a huge premium for clothing that makes healthful claims.

To support their net zero goals, validated by the Science-Based Targets initiative, the following best-selling names in kidswear focus less on product end-of-use. Instead, they’ve made headway on their materials footprints through things such as organic-cotton certifications and investment in textile recycling startups. Here’s a snapshot of how three best-selling children’s brands approach these efforts:

Carter’s

The 160-year-old Atlanta company holds a roughly one-fifth market share for children’s clothing, including its namesake brand and Osh Kosh B’Gosh. With 1,200 U.S. stores and wholesale partnerships with Amazon and Walmart, its sales reached $2.8 billion last year.

Carter’s sustainability strategy centers around safety, durability and sourcing, according to Anu Piduru, senior director of sustainability. 

By this fall, 99 percent of its clothing will have Oeko-Tex 100 certification. That label reflects testing of every part of a garment — including zippers, buttons, prints and labels— for the absence of 1,000 chemicals of concern, such as PFAS, bisphenol-A and heavy metals. This exceeds most regulatory requirements.

Carter’s maintains a restricted substances list for finished products and is rolling out the same for manufacturing, in alignment with respected standards.

The company’s small organic-cotton Little Planet line has taken off over the past four years, according to Piduru, “The biggest draw is the sustainable aspect, the certified organic cotton and the recycled materials that go into those products,” she told Trellis. Little Planet meets the Global Organic Textile Standard, which ensures organic fibers with “clean” chemistry.

The company wants to use cotton — which makes up 70 percent of its fiber mix — that is 100 percent sustainably sourced by 2030, enabled in part by the Better Cotton standard.

In May, Carter’s rebooted its KidsCycle takeback initiative; what was once as a mailback program has now expanded into (some) stores. In the most recent full year of the program, Terracycle helped Carter’s downcycle 22,467 pounds worth of products into bedding and sports equipment.

According to Piduru, Carter’s is still trying to understand its customers’ perception of brand sustainability and circular business models. That’s especially important, she said, because kidswear production cycles aren’t at a fast-fashion pace. “We don’t just kind of turn and burn through these designs,” Piduru said.

Carter’s hasn’t jumped into branded resale, partly because so many informal and third-party networks exist for people to keep kids’ clothes in circulation. For example, tens of thousands of Carter’s items sell each year on eBay, ThredUp and elsewhere. 

“As a mom myself, I know that children’s clothes in general are getting probably more used or used by more people than adult clothing is,” Piduru said. “You buy one shirt as an adult, and you might wear it once and donate it once, but I’ve got kids’ clothes that have been handed down to us by nieces and nephews and siblings.”

Eventually, though, “Circularity in childrenswear makes sense given its shorter lifecycles,” said Tasha Lewis, a North Carolina State University professor of human sciences who researches sustainability in fashion.

Gap Inc.

The San Francisco company, which had $15.1 billion in revenue last year, sells one-fifth of all baby clothes in the U.S., according to IBIS World. Relevant brands for the under-18 set include Gap Baby, Gap Kids, Old Navy and Athleta.

Gap Inc. got rid of PFAS in 2023, ahead of state regulations. It keeps restricted substances lists both for finished products and manufacturing.

Leaning heavily on natural fibers, Gap reached 98 percent cotton from “sustainable sources” in 2024, toward a 100 percent goal this year. That includes Better Cotton-certified material. Forty percent of its polyester is recycled, toward a 45 percent goal for 2025. As with H&M, however, it’s unclear, exactly where such preferable materials appear within children’s clothing.

Notably, Gap Inc. recently invested in Ambercycle, producer of textile-to-textile recycled polyester. It also committed to secure 10,000 tons per year of recycled polyester from textile-to-textile recycling startup Syre. And the company’s participation in the ThredUp resale marketplace kept 848,800 pieces of apparel out of landfills in 2024. That was mostly from its Athleta brand, the company said.

“As the resale revolution continues to gain momentum, participating in re-commerce is not only good for our planet, but good for business,” said Mark Breitbard, Gap Inc.’s president of specialty brands, in 2020.

H&M Group

Stockholm-based H&M Group, with 4,338 stores in 2024, accounts for 5-9 percent of the kids’ apparel market, according to Future Market Insights.

It’s not easy to determine exactly how much of the privately held group’s $24 billion in annual sales last year came from its juvenile offerings, but in its H&M retail stores, non-adult clothes appear to take up at least 10 percent of floor space. 

Although a fast fashion mainstay, the company seeks to become fully circular. “That means reducing waste and emissions across the value chain, and creating new business models that keep garments in use longer,” said CEO Helena Helmersson said in 2023.

As for resale, the H&M Pre-Loved line has since 2023 offered used clothing for all ages in partnership with ThredUp. H&M is also a majority owner of the European secondhand site Sellpy.

Meanwhile, H&M is also investing in recycled materials. For example, last year it co-launched startup Syre. It also recently revived its support of cotton-recycling startup Circulose and and has invested in lab-grown cotton startup Galy.

In 2024, 89 percent of the materials across H&M’s brands were recycled or “sustainably sourced,” toward a goal of 100 percent by 2030. All of its cotton is recycled, organic or otherwise sustainably sourced through programs such as Better Cotton. Ninety-four percent of its polyester is recycled, toward a 100-percent goal for 2025.

H&M was ahead of the curve 30 years ago in publishing its restricted materials list. The brand went PFAS-free more than a decade ago. It has demonstrated leadership in chemical management within its supply chain, backed up with well-respected third-party standards. However, like Gap, H&M has not focused on consumer-visible certifications such as OEKO-TEX.

One exception: its small collections of infant apparel with C2C Gold Certification from 2023. These organics could be composted at home, according to the standard overseen by the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute.

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Klean Kanteen helped to popularize plastic-free, reusable water bottles, weathering two decades by focusing on durable products rather than chasing aggressive growth. Ideals of serving “people, planet and profit” have helped the certified B Corporation endure recent challenges including tariffs that are uniquely hurting smaller businesses. In addition, the brand is adapting from a 2024 buyout and competing against copycats and the persistence of single-use plastic.

“We maintain by staying core to who we are and why we originally started, and not deviate too much from that,” said Global Product Manager Hunter Shoop. 

Standing against plastic

Privately held Klean Kanteen, which does not release sales figures, is navigating its share of the growing, $1.45 billion global market for stainless steel bottles. That will reach $2.08 billion by 2032, according to Data Bridge Market Research.

That said, with two supplier plants in China, Klean Kanteen has found the erratic tariff policies of the Trump administration a challenge. “They’ve jumped from single digits to triple digits, so it’s a pretty large impact on the business,” Shoop said. So far, Klean Kanteen has capped price increases to about $2 on certain products. Its 27-ounce bottles now list for $21.95.

The tariffs have not hurt Klean Kanteen’s sustainability efforts, though, which include working with suppliers to monitor their renewable energy usage and carbon footprints, according to Shoop.

Nevertheless, the Chico, California, business continues to swim upstream in its mission to provide alternatives to single-use plastic:

• Disposable plastic water bottle sales skyrocketed by nearly 3,000 percent between 1997 and 2021 in the United States, according to the Container Recycling Institute. 
• People toss more than two-thirds of the 86 billion bottles sold annually. 
• That $4.34 billion worldwide plastic bottle market will hit $6.46 billion in 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights.

Northern California roots

A father, son and daughter took over Klean Kanteen 19 years ago from Robert Seals, a Northern California sculptor who shaped the initial steel vessel. He had made Klean Kanteen a fixture at green festivals, music fairs and grocery co-ops. As some of the first stainless steel refillable options on the market, they appealed to consumers who considered single-use plastic water bottles severely uncool. (Shout out to my early-aughts model from Solar Festival in Hopland, California.)

The company had a headstart against mainstream fears over the health harms of drinking out of plastics, such as cancer, infertility and poor brain development. That gained momentum in 2008, when Walmart yanked plastic bottles containing toxic bisphenol-A from its shelves. Klean Kanteen also rode the wellness wave as bring-your-own-bottle hydration became the norm for gym rats and elementary schoolers.

In February 2024, the family-owned company allowed a third party to take over a controlling stake. That English investor, Think Better Group, is a mission-focused brand-holding group for sustainable products. It’s part of ABN AMRO SIF of Amsterdam, a $571 million institutional impact fund. Its other holdings include Ecoriginals diapers, Colonna Coffee and Minor Figures beverages.

“They’re bringing in some optimization and things like that, but for the most part, we still get to run independently, and it’s business as usual,” Shoop said.

The staff of roughly 40 people often sees the co-owner siblings, Michelle Kalberer and Jeff Cresswell, as the first in the building each day. “Their desks are literally out in the open in the middle of our offices,” Shoop said.

Pursuing certifications

“Everything that we do is around sustainability, trying to drive our footprints down, monitoring and measuring with third-party certifications,” Shoop said.

For instance, Klean Kanteen aligns its climate emissions reductions with those of the Science-Based Targets initiative, although it’s not formally pursuing validation. The goals include a 58.8 percent drop in emissions from Scopes 1 and 2 from a 2016 baseline by 2030, and a 30 percent Scope 3 reduction compared with 2019. The company is also Climate Label Certified.

By contributing 1 percent of gross sales to the 1% for the Planet program, Klean Kanteen has supported 135 nonprofits over 20 years. It will reach $5 million in giving this year, according to Caroleigh Pierce, who leads the company’s partnership and community engagement efforts.

Prizing durability

Making long-lasting, durable products that can be repaired and ultimately recycled underpins Klean Kanteen’s materials and design choices.

“When at all possible, we try and make our products so they can be repaired,” Shoop said, “or making sure that they could also be disassembled for proper end of use.”

A single-wall, non-insulated bottle remains Klean Kanteen’s best seller, especially in Europe. However, insulated bottles are increasingly popular, and an oven- and microwave-safe reusable food box also sells well. 

The company has spruced up bottle designs with colors and patterns, customizing caps for different beverages, but it hasn’t wildly diversified its product lineup. 

Strong sales of replacement kits for lids and their silicone gaskets reflect that customers are buying in to Klean Kanteen’s circularity strategy. How-to cleaning and maintenance videos encourage lifetime use.

Materials and safety

In addition to the circular-economy focus of durability, Klean Kanteen introduced 90 percent recycled steel in all products several years ago. 

“There are other brands that are starting to dabble a little bit here, a little bit there, but we made a commitment to jump all in,” Shoop said. The company worked with the raw steel manufacturer, not just the sourcing managers.

That recycled content, certified by Intertek, includes reclaimed steel from sources such as industrial equipment and even used kitchen appliances and tableware. The steel, a rust-proof alloy of 18 percent chromium and 8 percent nickel, doesn’t leach chemicals or flavor the water it holds, according to the company. 

In addition, Klean Kanteen introduced a Klean Coat finish several years ago to prevent color chipping and dents. The finish is applied by spraying a powder of electrically charged polyester resins that is then heat-cured. 

The company uses the GreenScreen for Safer Chemicals standard to ensure the coating is free of lead, BPA and phthalate chemicals.

Unlike aluminum bottles, stainless steel bottles have no plastic lining. Instead, an electropolish finish smoothes out microscopic irregularities inside each bottle.

Klean Kanteen uses a chemical hazard analysis for its bottle components and packaging as well.

Its focus on chemical safety is reflected in partnerships with the Environmental Working Group and the Breast Cancer Fund. 

Small hangtags for retail displays comprise much of Klean Kanteen’s packaging footprint, although plastic bags wrap products that are shipped. The company tried biobased plastic packaging but reverted to recycled petroleum plastic, which was more likely to be recycled.

Lots of sales happen online, including from Amazon. That said, “We’re not losing sight of our roots and where we started,” Shoop said. “So we’re still in those organic grocery stores and the smaller chains.”

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When RMI surveyed carbon market participants over the past couple of years, the non-profit heard tales that will be familiar to anyone who has navigated the ecosystem’s confusing array of document and data types. Project developers reported spending up to 60 percent of their time dealing with requests for data. Buyers said due diligence could take as long as 18 months.

In July, the organization unveiled its solution: an open-source framework designed to “bring structure to the vast universe of carbon credit data.”

The potential benefits of RMI’s Carbon Crediting Data Framework (CCDF) are already evident in a pilot catalogue of carbon credits developed by Centigrade, a startup that is partnering with the non-profit. On display are climate projects ranging from fuel-efficient cookstoves in Guatemala to forest conservation in Mississippi. Potential buyers and other users can click through to a wealth of information, presented in standardized form for each project. Data points include number of available credits, estimated price and ratings from third-party agencies.

Hundreds of data fields

Underneath the hood of Centigrade’s system is a framework based on at least 570 fields, grouped into categories and sub-categories. The fields were chosen by RMI’s Carbon Markets Initiative team and integrate methodologies from major registries, including Verra and Puro.earth; quality criteria from the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market; and templates for suppliers, such as those developed by Frontier, a coalition of carbon removal buyers.

Widespread adoption of the framework would bring multiple benefits, said Bonnie Lei, an RMI principal. Project developers could make a single set of data available for potential buyers, eliminating the duplicative effort of replying to several different sets of questions. And buyers could assemble candidate projects in a data room for easy comparison. 

Making it easier for buyers to assess credit quality is a focus of the project, added Lei. Free-to-access databases of credits already exist, including one developed by the Climate Action Data Trust, a stakeholder initiative founded by the World Bank and others. But the CCDF is designed to extend these projects by providing additional data. 

“You really need to be able to go into these sets of fields that get into understanding the emissions components of the credit,” said Lei. “As well as the social, environmental dimensions, which we believe are really important and distinguishing for credits.”

One schema to rule them all

To realize the vision of a unified data framework, the CCDF’s backers now need to persuade market players to back it. One wrinkle here is that RMI’s framework is not the only game in town. Sixteen schemas have been submitted to the Carbon Data Open Protocol (CDOP), a stakeholder initiative designed to develop a common data framework. The project is co-chaired by RMI, which has submitted the CCDF alongside the others. Lei said she expected the different options to be inputs into a single framework that will be published in stages, with the first release planned for Climate Week NYC in September.

If and when the CDOP committee reaches an agreement, adoption will still be a challenge. “There are real costs in terms of coordination and implementation to pulling off this sort of standardization,” said Grayson Badgley, a research scientist at CarbonPlan, a nonprofit that analyzes climate solutions. “Everyone already has their systems in place and I’d imagine changing things comes with all sorts of edge cases and risks. First and foremost, the incentives and benefits of standardization need to outweigh those costs.”

It’s also worth noting that data standardization does not inevitably mean that project developers will share all the information needed to fully evaluate projects. “It’s equally important that everyone can access the actual project and credit data itself,” said Badgley. “That would help make sure that everyone — buyers, sellers, researchers — has the ability to study and evaluate the performance of both individual projects and the market as a whole.”

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Nearly every week brings another brand partnership, factory blueprint or financing deal related to a polyester recycling startup. The space is crowded with young companies seeking to weave together a circular economy that pushes virgin polyester to the margins.

In a few short decades, polyester has displaced cotton as the dominant fiber. It’s found in nearly two-thirds of new fashions. Because it’s made with cheap fossil fuel byproducts, however, the apparel industry’s emissions shot up 7.5 percent in 2023 after a modest dip, according to a June report by the Apparel Impact Institute. And as a result, the industry accounts for almost 2 percent of all the world’s climate emissions.

Brands striving to reduce that impact, along with its regulatory and operational risks, plan to procure more recycled and “next-generation” materials. So far, only 12.5 percent of polyester comes from recycled sources, 99 percent of which begins as bottles rather than textiles, according to the Textile Exchange.

Source: Samsara Eco

It’s no easy feat to court partners in a new, waste-based supply chain within the fragmented textile industry. To begin with, a startup needs an efficient technology to transform unwanted fabrics into something new. It must also procure and sort castoff garments or factory clippings from third parties. Once the buttons, trims and zippers are removed, the material needs to be recycled into a raw output, such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) pellets. Yet another partner spins that into fiber, which someone else turns into a textile for a brand.

The final leg in this process: efficient factories. “Ramping to full capacity, which they must operate close to if they are to at least break even, is the big challenge,” said Marcian Lee, an analyst with Lux Research.

Textile recycling executives insist that there’s room for multiple players to spin old plastic threads into valuable textiles. Here’s how five of them are seeking to bring a textile-to-textile recycling system to life.

Circ

Circ is building a $500 million plant in northeastern France. Scheduled to open in 2028, it would be the largest industrial polycotton recycling operation.

Many synthetic recycling startups say they accept textile blends, including polyester-cotton, to produce material for fresh polyester fibers. Circ distinguishes itself by recycling the cotton, too.

“You’re really maximizing the economic value of what’s in that starting material,” Conor Hartman, Circ’s chief operating officer, told Trellis in May. “We’ve taken polycotton originating material and made it into beautiful lyocell products and beautiful polyester products.”

Source: Samsara Eco

Circ’s recycled cellulosic lyocell appeared in a small collection last month from Zalando, which is an investor, as are Patagonia and Inditex. Circ recently inked deals with fiber producers, too, including China’s Tanshan Sanyou and Portugal’s Selenis.

Earlier this year, Circ kicked off Fiber Club, a collaboration to scale recycled fibers that Bestseller, Eileen Fisher, Everlane and fiber producers support. Such bridge-building follows the Circ-Ready community launch of partners a year ago.

Virginia-based Circ has attracted $76.6 million of investment, the most recent coming in 2023 via a Series B raise of $25 million.

Ambercycle

Ambercycle has partnered with Reformation, Arc’teryx and Gap’s Athleta as well as important textile and polyester companies in North America, Europe and Asia, including Shenghong Holding Group and Zhejiang Huilong New Materials of China.

In January, the startup secured an offtake agreement to replace about 20 percent of Danish brand Ganni’s polyester usage. That follows a three-year, 70-million-euro offtake agreement with Inditex in 2023 and another binding deal with brand Mas. 

“We’ve tried to piece together the pathway to get to this commercial scale, because the challenge with us and really everyone in this space is that, out the gate, the competition with existing fibers is pretty significant,” CEO Shay Sethi told Trellis in June.

Ambercycle is developing an enzymatic recycling feature that would allow a multi-fiber output, enabling brands a “one-stop shop” if they want specific blends of, say, polyester, nylon or spandex, according to Sethi.

Last year, Taiwan’s Shinkong Synthetic Fibers provided $10 million toward a commercial plant for Ambercycle, expected to open in 2026. Ambercycle, whose pilot plant has been running in Los Angeles since 2022, has raised $56 million in its 10 years.

Sethi envisions an industry that balances both centralized operations and regional production. “With textile waste, for better or worse, there’s no shortage anywhere you look,” he said.

Reju

With offices in Paris, Reju piggybacks on its Dutch parent Technip Energies, which counted $6.9 billion in revenues last year. The umbrella company’s resources in engineering and chemicals include polyester production. 

Reju’s pilot plant in Frankfurt opened 20 months ago. Next, a large-scale factory planned for the Chemelot industrial park in the Netherlands would recycle 300 million polyester garments each year by 2027.

European Union rules that require brands to take responsibility for their textile waste provide a boost, but Reju is eyeing “regeneration hubs” elsewhere, too. It hooked up with Goodwill and Waste Management last fall to lay a foundation in North America.

Reju uses IBM’s VolCat technology, short for volatile catalyst. “We’re dealing with known chemistry here,” CEO Patrik Frisk told Trellis in May. “Part of what makes polyester so easy for the textile industry is, first of all, the infrastructure for it has been thoroughly developed over the last 70 or 80 years.”

That frees up Reju to build out its circular system, according to Frisk, former CEO at Under Armour. Despite its problematic origins and contribution to microplastic waste, the material is endowed with useful properties and thus here to stay, he said. “We’re able to take away all the stuff that’s bad, and create new again.”

By giving the waste a second life, Reju can potentially design materials that shed fewer microfibers, Frisk added.

Source: Samsara Eco

Samsara Eco

With machine learning, Samsara Eco customizes enzymes that “eat” polyester. Last year, it proved it can do the same for nylon 6,6. The result appeared in a long-sleeve Lululemon top. In June, the startup established a decade-long offtake agreement, vying to provide potentially one-fifth of Lululemon’s overall fiber portfolio.

In addition to creating a $25 million R&D hub in Jerrabomberra, Australia, Samsara Eco is working with Israeli nylon producer Nilit on a recycling plant to open next year in Southeast Asia, home of partner waste suppliers.

“But that will only be the first of our facilities where we’re talking closely with polymerization partners in Europe and in North America as well across better packaging and fashion,” CEO Paul Riley told Trellis last winter.

Samsara Eco has raised $107 million. It aims to give new life to 1.5 million tons of plastics annually by 2030. That’s less than half of 1 percent of global plastic production each year, leaving plenty of room for multiple recyclers, Riley suggested.

“We’re looking at infinite recycling, true circularity across fashion and packaging,” he said, “and an important thing to note is that there is no difference between our molecule and a fossil fuel molecule. We tap straight into the supply chain.”

Syre

Syre in June touted strategic deals to supply Gap, Target and Houdini Sportswear with its chemically recycled polyester, which it says carries only 15 percent of the CO2-equivalent footprint of the virgin standard. Gap alone would use 10,000 metric tons of Syre’s output annually.

First, though, Syre has to break ground on the 12 commercial scale plants it originally announced for late 2026.

Before it even had a demo facility, Syre had an eye-popping $600 million promise of seven years of support from co-founder H&M. The Swedish startup’s long-term end is to recycle at least 3 million metric tons of polyester each year.

Syre is colocating a pilot plant in North Carolina with a Selenis polyester production facility. It has the ambition to bring “gigascale” plants to Vietnam and Iberia in the next few years. “This is the start of the great textile shift,” Syre CEO Dennis Nobelius told Trellis in June.

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