Consumer expenditure on fast fashion — inexpensive, non-durable clothing produced rapidly by mass-market retailers — continues to soar and has almost doubled in volume since the 1990s. The overconsumption of fast fashion has exacerbated the challenge of curbing textile manufacturing emissions, which currently account for 10% of global emissions, and post-consumer textile waste, whereby only 1% of used clothes today are recycled into new clothes.
To date, the market lacks cost-competitive technology that can process mixed textiles into high-quality recycled materials. Despite textile recycling being one of the oldest recycling processes, it still faces numerous challenges to ensuring that re-produced materials are at the same quality as virgin materials, including: the inability to handle mixed textile feedstocks, costly manual sorting, and intensive chemical separations.
That is why we are excited to announce Toyota Ventures’ investment in Tereform, which is focused on delivering recycled textiles at near cost parity with virgin, fossil-based materials while cutting overall emissions associated with apparel manufacturing.
Based in Denver, Colorado, Tereform was founded in 2022 by Kevin Sullivan (CEO) and Mikhail Konev (CTO) after spinning out of the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL). Tereform’s mission is to enable circularity for textiles in a less expensive and energy-intensive method than traditional processes. The team, with backgrounds in chemistry and depolymerization, has developed a chemical pathway for recycling polyester from mixed feedstocks, without the arduous manual or chemical preprocessing separations. Prior to founding Tereform, Kevin helped develop new recycling technologies for NREL’s thermocatalytic plastics depolymerization programs and received his doctorate in inorganic chemistry from Emory University. Additionally, Mikhail is an organic chemist with a background in applied research and development, having received his doctorate in organic chemistry from the University of California, Irvine.
To bypass roadblocks in traditional textile-to-textile recycling, Tereform is able to chemically process mixed textiles with minimal prior separation of the materials into individual fabric types, or removal of coatings, dyes, and other contaminants — removing a highly labor-intensive step. Tereform’s solution is especially effective for recycling some of the more challenging textile substrates, such as polyester/spandex blends.
“The two most significant obstacles to scaling textile-to-textile recycling are the labor- and time-intensive nature of pre-processing, and the absence of existing technologies to handle mixed feedstocks. By addressing both challenges, Tereform’s technology has the ability to unlock the full climate potential of recycling textiles by reducing the overall impact of textile manufacturing and downstream impacts from the disposal of clothing. We are confident in the team’s ability to tackle this challenge and look forward to supporting them on their mission to enable circularity within the fashion and textile industries.” — Lisa Coca, Climate Fund partner, Toyota Ventures
Tereform’s proprietary process uses oxygen and bio-based solvents to break down synthetic textiles that contain complex additives into their chemical building blocks: monomers. The company’s technology mimics processes used commercially in the chemical industry and results in products that can be made back into polyester as a drop-in replacement for virgin plastics in textiles and beyond. This approach enables the creation of recycled monomers from waste textiles that can be sent to existing polymer manufacturers, while maintaining cost-competitiveness and reducing greenhouse gas emissions compared to new plastic production. Tereform has shown impressive results, highlighted by ongoing discussions with brand partners to scale the process using both post-consumer and post-industrial textile waste.
Toyota Ventures is proud to participate in Tereform’s $1.25 million seed funding round, led by AccelR8. Climate Fund partner Lisa Coca and analyst Jay Patel drove Toyota Ventures’ investment in the round.
To learn more about Tereform, visit the company’s website or the Toyota Ventures portfolio page.