What is recycled clothing actually made from?
If you are picturing old T-shirts turned into new ones, you are not alone. Most people assume that recycled clothing is made from old garments. But that is not the reality.
In truth, 92% of all recycled fibers comes from rPET—polyester made from end-of-life plastic bottles. While this process is a legitimate form of recycling, it isn’t circular. In most cases, the recycled material cannot be recycled again—and it does not address the mountains of textile waste the fashion industry leaves in its wake.
Each year, fashion produces over 100 billion garments—most of them made from synthetic materials like polyester. As clothing becomes cheaper, faster, and more disposable nearly everywhere in the world, the ‘new normal’ is to wear a garment only a few times before discarding it. Most of these clothes are sent to landfill and incineration, while less than 1% of used clothes are recycled back into new clothing. The rest is landfilled, incinerated, or downcycled—often polluting ecosystems with synthetic fibers that don’t biodegrade.
So, with mountains of old clothes piling up, why are we still recycling bottles instead?
The answer lies in complexity. Plastic bottles are relatively simple: clear, additive-free, and a mono-material. That uniformity made them an ideal early candidate for recycling. Garments, however, are another story.
If you check the label on what you are wearing right now, you will likely see at least two materials: blends of cotton, polyester, elastane, nylon, or other fibers, both natural and synthetic. Unlike water bottles, most clothing is made from a complex combination of fibers, trims, dyes, finishes, and performance treatments—all of which vary not only by brand or garment type, but by production year and even dye lot. To purify this tangled material feedstock and transform it into consistent, high-quality raw material output—without sacrificing performance or integrity—requires a level of technical precision that most existing systems weren’t built for.
That’s why bottles became the first feedstock for recycling: It was easier to work with, and easier to scale. Using water bottles to make new garments was an important step forward. It helped prove that supply chains could shift, that infrastructure could grow, and that materials can have a second life. But while rPET marked progress toward a more beautiful, resource-conscious world, it was not the perfect solution. It left the problem of fashion waste largely unanswered.
Ultimately, turning a bottle into a garment simply lengthens its journey to the landfill.
Once a bottle becomes a T-shirt, it leaves the bottle recycling stream and cannot be recycled back into a water bottle. And once that T-shirt has reached the end of its life, it can’t be recycled back into a T-shirt through traditional forms of recycling. Mechanically recycled polyester degrades with each use, meaning that rPET loses strength and quality with every turn. So while rPET delays the inevitable, it doesn’t change the destination. It still ends in the landfill.
Meanwhile, the demand for recycled plastics is growing—and despite the excess of plastic waste, the global supply of bottles is falling short. Major beverage brands are keeping their bottles in their own closed-loop circular systems, without entering other industries like fashion at all. This creates a race for feedstock of recyclable materials.
So, while making clothes from bottles might sound sustainable, it is actually reinforcing reliance on new plastic—not reducing it.
Unlocking the solution to textile-to-textile regeneration through cycora®.
If we want to solve the problem at hand—the mountain of clothing waste piling up around our Earth—we cannot keep relying on other industries’ discards. We need solutions specifically designed for fashion’s waste stream. That means building circularity from the inside out, starting with the most-used material in clothing today: polyester.
For decades, textile-to-textile recycling was considered technically impossible. The chemical composition of used garments—blended fibers, dyes, finishes, elastics, foils—posed challenges too complex for traditional recycling infrastructure.
When our founders were studying molecular biology at UC Davis, they were in search of such a scientific impossibility: one that would meaningfully change the world for the better. With the amount of clothing piling up in landfills and polluting our Earth, textile regeneration was more than a worthy candidate for a scientific breakthrough.
After years of rigorous experiments, they arrived at their world-changing solution: a molecular regeneration technology that transforms discarded textiles into new materials—what we call cycora®. Validated by CETI (The European Centre for Innovative Textiles) our material matches the strength and quality of virgin polyester, making cycora® its true replacement. And perhaps best of all: the material could be continuously regenerated, lifecycle after lifecycle, with no loss in quality.
Rewriting the rules of what can be recycled, through science.
Unlike the recycling of plastic bottles (rPET), our process doesn’t require perfectly uniform inputs. It’s built to handle any polyester-based textile feedstock—textiles with mixed materials, chemical finishes, and unpredictable supply chains. We separate and remove additives, purify the molecular building blocks, and rebuild them into cycora® regenerated material: strong, consistent, and ready to be made continuously new.
We have started with polyester simply because it is the largest contributor to clothing waste today. But this is just the beginning of a long journey toward a world without waste. We are actively working on expanding our technology to handle more types of fibers, garments, and pathways to regeneration.
But the goal isn’t just to create circular materials, it's to change the whole system.
Now that we’ve proven with cycora® that a virgin replacement is possible, we’re focused on scaling the systems to support it—rethinking how clothes are designed for recyclability, shifting how we consume, and building real infrastructure for textile-to-textile regeneration at a global scale.
As a team of scientists, engineers, product experts and creatives—all deeply and personally passionate about ending clothing waste—we are actively working to scale our technology at a commercial level. This is materializing in the form of partnerships with global brands, and investments in the infrastructure necessary to make cycora® a tangible and planetary solution to the problem of fashion waste.
We know we cannot do it alone. We are collaborating with designers to craft for regeneration, with brands to reimagine supply chains, and with people who wear clothes. To change the story of what our clothes are, how we relate to them, and what they can become.
