SEATTLE, Wash. — April 1, 2022 — Textile innovations company Evrnu announced today the launch of the world’s first high-performance, recyclable lyocell material made entirely from cotton textile waste: 100% NuCycl r-lyocell. Using cotton textile waste as its sole raw material, this breakthrough fiber is designed to replace and outperform virgin cellulosic and plastic-based materials and offer significant impact reductions, all while maintaining recyclability. Evrnu has launched this fiber with a premium T-Shirt made of 100-percent NuCycl r-lyocell by designer Carlos Campos, available now on CarlosCampos.com.
Since 2014, Evrnu has been forging a pathway for the tens of millions of tons of textile waste that end up in landfills or incinerators every year to flow back into the value chain. Evrnu’s suite of chemical recycling solutions use textile waste as a resource — breaking it down and regenerating it into new materials that outperform both virgin cellulosic and plastic textiles.
100-percent NuCycl r-lyocell marks Evrnu’s first commercially available fiber. Not only does this fiber use cotton textile waste diverted from landfills as its only input, but it can directly replace 90-percent of current textile fibers, including cotton, man-made cellulosic fibers, nylon, and polyester. This is a huge breakthrough for the textile industry, which has long been searching for bio-based alternatives to plastic.
Knowing performance and quality are key to adoption, Evrnu’s 100% NuCycl lyocell meets or exceeds the performance attributes of high tenacity nylon and polyester in terms of tenacity, strength, comfort, and more, all while remaining recyclable up to 10x.
“We have at least a 20-year push to innovate around climate change to make up for the past 100 years of collateral industrial damage,” said Stacy Flynn, co-founder and CEO of Evrnu. “Our team and partners are dedicated and aligned to outperforming and scaling textile recycling solutions to bring our industry into balance with natural systems.”
To create this fiber, Evrnu has advanced the existing lyocell manufacturing method, which traditionally processes virgin wood, to instead process textile waste. By tuning its technologies to fit into existing manufacturing infrastructure, Evrnu is creating a pathway to quickly scale its chemical recycling solutions for the fashion industry.
Evrnu has raised $31 million in funding to-date and is currently building a new facility in the southeast US to demonstrate its fiber regeneration technologies at commercial scale. This new facility will service 17,000 metric tons of pulp and 2,000 tons of fiber per year.
“For the first time in the history of the textile industry we can now outperform 90 percent of the market using what is currently perceived as waste,” said Christopher Stanev, CTO of Evrnu. “Since we founded Evrnu, we have proven our technologies not only work but are scalable using existing infrastructure; imagine what our industry will look like when we are done.”
The Carlos Campos T-Shirt made of Evrnu’s new fiber is now available on CarlosCampos.com for $110. With this launch, Evrnu is showcasing how it can use textile waste as its sole raw material to reduce brands’ reliance on both virgin cellulosic and plastic materials. Evrnu will continue commercializing 100-percent NuCycl r-lyocell with a range of brand partners in the coming months, as it works towards developing a larger, closed-loop circular ecosystem for the textiles industry.
Posted: Apri1 1, 2022
Source: Evrnu
