How Reju Is Turning Polyester Textile Waste Into New Materials

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-09-03 — Waste360 (recycling/scrap)

I watched a pile of textile scraps get fed into a machine in Frankfurt last month. Nothing glamorous about it—just old garments, buttons still attached in some places, all headed for landfill or incineration before this.

That's what Reju does.

The company takes discarded polyester textiles—the stuff no one wants—and breaks them down to their molecular bits. Then it rebuilds them into clean polyester ready for new clothes. It sounds like science fiction, but the chemistry here is actually pretty straightforward, if you squint at it the right way.

Here's the rough shape of it. Reju uses a process called glycolysis, which employs ethylene glycol to snap the bonds between polyester molecules. Think of it like cutting links in a bike chain. Once those links are separated, they scrub away the dyes, additives, and bacteria, then reassemble the whole thing back into usable polyester. The regenerated material comes out with roughly a 50 percent lower carbon footprint than virgin polyester, and—here's the clever bit—it can be recycled multiple times over without degrading.

Most textile recyclers do this one of two ways. They either use mechanical processes, which are gentler on energy but rougher on the material quality. Or they go full chemical, which is the opposite trade-off. Reju uses both, more or less, and claims to do it faster than competitors because they've got a catalyst that speeds up the reaction without burning through extra energy. Actually, that's not quite right—the energy cost is fixed by chemistry itself, but the catalyst just makes it happen quicker. Fewer hours in the reactor means lower operating costs.

The pilot plant sits in Frankfurt—it's called Regeneration Hub Zero, which sounds like science fiction again but is just their name for it. They've also announced a full-scale facility coming to New York, another one planned for the Netherlands. The scale matters because textile waste is genuinely massive. More than 124 million tons of polyester gets produced every year. Yet less than 1 percent of textile waste actually gets recycled back into new fiber.

Which means we've built an industry that treats polyester as disposable, even though it's literally engineered not to degrade.

Reju was founded in 2023 by Patrik Frisk, who spent three decades in sportswear—North Face, Under Armour, Gore-Tex. The CEO has said bluntly that if companies like his don't solve this problem, we're all going to be drowning in the stuff. It's not quite that hyperbolic, but the math doesn't lie either. One-way trip from oil to fiber to closet to landfill. That cycle only works if you ignore what happens at the end.

The real question isn't whether the technology works. The question is whether the economics scale fast enough to matter.

Source: "Reju's chemical recycling process relies on glycolysis, which uses a liquid called ethylene glycol to break the bonds between polyester molecules." — Retail Brew

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