Stretch fabrics are notoriously hard to process. When your old leggings wear out, they will probably end up in a landfill—even if you try to drop them off for recycling. But a Manhattan startup has developed a new material that could finally make this corner of the apparel industry circular.
“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.
Making stretch fabric from a single material
Jogikalmath, who started his career as a protein chemist, took inspiration from the way that proteins are structured. Normally, nylon has tight hydrogen bonds that make the material stiff and resistant to stretching. Using a protein-inspired approach, the startup re-formulated the structure so that the molecules can slide past each other under stress and then spring back when the stress is released.
After making a proof of concept and raising a seed round of funding from Khosla Ventures, the team went through years of R&D. This year, it worked with a mill that specializes in stretch fabric to make samples of the final material. “They were equally as excited with the results,” says CEO and cofounder William Calvert. “And now we’re putting it through the paces where it can be commercialized.”
With the use of the startup’s chemistry, the material can be made in any mill that makes nylon yarn, not just those that specialize in stretch. After the yarn is made, it can be made into fabric without adding any new machinery or process changes, meaning that it could easily scale up, unlike some other novel materials.
