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The Ravel team at its Seattle pilot facility, from left: Forest Davis, process development scientist; John Goods, co-founder and chief technologist; Zahlen Titcomb, co-founder and CEO; Zack Wolford, research engineer; and Kristen Albrecht, chief sustainability officer and vice president of operations. Not pictured: Jules Valenti, director of engineering and pilot plant manager. (Ravel Photo)
As the sayings go, you can’t unscramble an egg or un-ring a bell. But Seattle startup Ravel has accomplished a similar feat in pursuit of clothes recycling.
The company on Tuesday announced it has raised an undisclosed sum of pre-seed funding to expand its deployment of a proprietary, planet friendly technology that unwinds the components of fabric blends.
Ravel has targeted the textile fiber known as elastane, which is also called spandex or Lycra. It’s added to athletic wear, jackets, jeans, underwear, socks, t-shirts, gloves and every other category of apparel. Even in small amounts, elastane creates big problems.
“It lets things be stretchy. It lets them recoil,” said Ravel CEO Zahlen Titcomb. “It’s great, but it also makes all that clothing not recyclable.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that roughly 13% of clothing and shoes are recycled, according to a 2018 study, with much of the waste textiles going to landfills or being incinerated. And the volume of clothing being produced is soaring. Apparel brands today are making about twice the amount of clothes that were produced in the early 2000s.
So Ravel has developed a technology for unblending fabrics that include elastane. It turns the recovered ingredient into cost-competitive, recycled plastic pellets that serve as the raw material for making polyester fabrics.
The startup calls its process “purification recycling” and emphasizes that it is energy efficient, uses safe chemicals and does not create added waste or byproducts.
“It’s not ‘downcycling’ either,” Titcomb said, which is when an item is recycled, but to a less valuable purpose. “It’s preserving the quality of the materials,” he added.
Plastic pellets made from elastane that has been purified from recycled textiles in a process created by Ravel. (Ravel Photo)
Ravel launched in 2019, has a six-person team, and in the past received funding from friends and family to finance its technology development. The newly announced investors include One Ventures, Collateral Good, Collab Shared Future Fund, Climate Capital and others.
The startup built a pilot plant that is recycling industrial volumes of textiles and working with customers to produce material at scale.
“We know what we have works,” Titcomb said.
Titcomb is a Ravel co-founder and previously launched a bamboo apparel brand and line of bamboo boxer shorts. Co-founder Kristen Albrecht is Ravel’s chief sustainability officer and vice president of operations. She previously co-founded a supply chain company. Co-founder and chief technologist John Goods has a doctorate degree in organic chemistry and his background includes product development.
The Ravel team is doing engineering work in preparation for commercial-scale operations, but didn’t say when or where the facilities will be built. Given the company’s circular economy and environmental focus, they’re looking to strategically co-locate alongside other players in the supply chain to reduce the energy spent shipping materials to and from their facilities.
The startup is partnering with apparel companies, textile makers and raw material manufacturers. Titcomb said numerous clothing brands are eager to incorporate recycled goods as part of their sustainability mission. But almost all of the recycled material for textiles comes from tossed water bottles — a source that’s frowned upon given that it’s downcycling to turn them into apparel instead of new bottles.
And some U.S. states and the European Union are pursuing legislation to address the glut of tossed clothes, creating more demand for services like Ravel’s.
Equipment used in Ravel’s textile recycling process. (Ravel Photo)
Washington state lawmakers this year considered House Bill 1420, requiring the producers of textiles and fashion apparel to create a recycling program akin to those in place for consumer electronics, paint, batteries and other hard-to-dispose-of goods. The bill passed out of a House committee, but is likely dead for this session.
California passed a similar law last year, and New York is pursuing its own textile waste regulations.
Companies worldwide are working on this problem, including Seattle’s Evrnu, which launched in 2014, as well as Ambercycle, Infinited Fiber, Circ, Worn Again Technologies and others.
Ravel currently has technology for addressing elastane given its prevalence and challenges, and plans to expand to the recycling of other textile ingredients.
Titcomb said that while it wants to curb waste, the startup doesn’t want to discourage people from thrifting and upcycling clothing that still have life in them.
“I’ve always been a bit of a secondhand guy, going back to hitting the Goodwill bins in my youth,” he said. “I come from a big family, I have four younger siblings, and so there’s a lot of hand-me-down mentality in my upbringing.”
But with so much apparel getting thrown away or sent to lower-income countries where the items might not be wearable, Titcomb gets excited about the potential for their technology, and for changes to the sector overall.
“It is a huge problem, and it’s been such a dormant problem for so long — how we treat materials,” he said. If the world starts recycling in a meaningful way and people can proudly wear more sustainable fashion, Titcomb said, “imagine the impact that can have on an entire generation of consumption patterns.”
