""There's a reason why billions of pounds of textiles ends up in landfills," says Gangadhar Jogikalmath, cofounder and chief technology officer of the startup, called Return to Vendor. "When we dial it down to the microscopic scale, it's because everything that we wear has blends of yarn put together to create this apparel- nylon blended with spandex, wool with nylon, cotton, polyester.""
"Any fabric blend is hard to disassemble, and stretch fabric is especially challenging. "You can't shred it," says Jogikalmath. "The spandex melts at a lower temperature, gums up the recycling machinery, and your recycling system really suffers from having even a small amount of spandex in it." To tackle the challenge, the startup has spent the last four years designing fabric that uses a single material-nylon-and transforms it so that a material with fibers that normally wouldn't stretch suddenly can. Then, at the end of its life, since it's a "mono material," it can easily be recycled and turned into new fabric for new clothing."
Stretch and blended fabrics are difficult to recycle because mixed yarns and low-melting spandex gum up recycling machinery and cause garments to end in landfills. Return to Vendor engineered a mono-material nylon that behaves like stretch fabric by reformulating molecular structure so fibers can slide under stress and spring back. The founder used protein-structure-inspired chemistry to loosen nylon's hydrogen bonding and create stretch without added elastomers. The team produced a proof of concept, secured seed funding from Khosla Ventures, pursued years of R&D, and worked with a mill to scale production, enabling easier end-of-life recycling into new fabric.
Read at Fast Company
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