Beyond fashion: Polyester’s untold impact
The clothes in our wardrobes aren’t the only contributors to the textile industry’s waste and climate impacts. Textiles are everywhere – from the seatbelts, upholsteries, and airbags in our cars to the furniture in our homes, offices, and public spaces. Syre’s mission is to decarbonize and dewaste the textile industry, starting with polyester – the world’s biggest fiber, found far beyond fashion.
Polyester is not only the world’s biggest, but also the fastest-growing fiber – and the largest emitter. To most of us, it’s just another word on a clothing label. In reality, it’s an essential and often unknown material found in our homes and vehicles – and beyond. It offers performance that other fibers cannot provide and is needed in products with high and durable performance requirements, such as sports and outdoor apparel, seatbelts, airbags, furniture, and more.
While the fashion industry consumes roughly 55 percent of the world’s polyester, the remainder is divided among home interior, automotive, packaging, and an array of other industries1. For example, an average car uses 35 kilos of textiles2. Polyester is a common ingredient, found in everything from seats and seatbelts to insulation to tire reinforcements, accounting for almost 20 kilos in an average car.
Polyester’s massive impact
Virgin polyester is made from crude oil and the current recycled polyester, bottle-to-fiber (rPET), disturbs a perfect circular system as it cannot go back to food grade PET-bottles again. What was once a groundbreaking innovation in the textile space is now responsible for up to 40 percent of the entire textile industry’s CO2e emissions.
But quitting polyester isn’t the answer. Changing the way it is produced is.
Polyester is everywhere: an essential but often unknown material in homes, vehicles, and public spaces. Its impact stretches far beyond fashion. So far, the call for change in the automotive and home interior sectors hasn’t been as loud as in fashion. But they’re now approaching the same turning point: regulations tightening around waste, companies racing to secure circular supply, and customers beginning to demand to know what their cars and home interiors are made of.
Over the last decade, a wave of solutions to the textile industry’s biggest challenges have surfaced. New and innovative materials are replacing the old and carbon intensive ones. Groundbreaking technologies are changing how we grow, produce, and yield raw materials. And bold solutions are set to cut emissions across production and supply chains.
Beyond fashion, circular polyester will play a central role in how mobility and interiors evolve, and the demand is already outpacing the supply. As with apparel brands, those moving early will secure supply and stability, while slower movers may face rising costs as well as regulatory pressure tightening on virgin polyester.
Rethinking waste
As technology advances, the way waste is seen must change too – from something to get rid of to a resource that can be used again and again. Today, large volumes of post-consumer waste are landfilled across the globe. And large volumes of post-industrial waste – from scraps to production spill – are incinerated or landfilled, even though they could serve as valuable feedstock. By broadening the definition of textile waste to include both post-consumer and post-industrial streams, the industry could accelerate the scaling of textile-to-textile recycling quicker – a much-needed scaling to start moving circular materials from the innovation stage to broad adoption.
This is why Syre exists. By scaling textile-to-textile recycling and produce circular polyester, we believe we can help move all the polyester heavy industries in the right direction. But this is one piece of a big puzzle. It will take many players across the value chain, from brands to suppliers, manufacturers, and spinners working together towards the textile shift needed.
1 Apparel Impact Institute: Taking Stock of Progress Against the Roadmap to Net Zero 2025
2 International Fiber Journal: Automotive textile producers prepare for total transformation