$390 Million Says Polyester Is Worth Saving

By Shweta Sonali — 2026-07-21

I read this and had to put my chai down. A company just bet $390 million on chemical recycling. In America. On an old Kodak factory.

The company is called Reju. It's a spinout of Technip Energies, a French engineering giant, and as far as I can tell, it's one of the more serious attempts anyone has made at closing the loop on synthetic textile waste. Not "serious" in the press-release sense. Serious in the we've-committed-to-an-18.9-acre-site sense.

Here's the basic problem they're trying to solve. The fashion industry generates roughly 92 million tonnes of textile waste every year, most of it polyester, and most of that polyester goes nowhere useful. Not recycled, not composted, not anything. Just sitting somewhere. Polyester can take between 20 and 200 years to break down, which means the Zara dress someone chucked in 2010 is essentially still out there, doing nothing, going nowhere.

Meanwhile, what passes for recycled polyester right now is mostly a con. According to industry figures, 98% of recycled polyester comes from plastic bottles, not textile waste — so brands calling their fleece jackets "circular" are, to put it diplomatically, stretching the definition.

Reju is trying to do something different. Actually, that's not quite right — they already are doing something different, just not yet at the scale they're chasing.

The chemistry bit, briefly

The technology is called VolCat. It was originally co-developed in a collaborative venture among Technip, IBM, and Under Armour, though Under Armour is no longer involved. What it does, more or less, is break polyester down at the molecular level — using a mix of ethylene glycol and heat to dissolve PET into molecules that can then be reassembled into virgin-quality polyester again.

That part alone is interesting. But what makes it genuinely useful is how it handles blended fabrics. Most recyclers can only work with mono-material inputs — pure polyester, pure cotton. The moment you have a poly-cotton blend, which is most of what fast fashion actually produces, traditional recyclers shrug. VolCat doesn't just dissolve the polyester. It separates usable cotton in the process. That's a meaningful distinction.

The process extracts clean monomers while creating 50 percent less CO2 than virgin polyester. A Deloitte lifecycle assessment confirmed that figure. So you get material that performs like new and leaves a smaller footprint. That's the pitch.

Pennsylvania, then Rochester

Reju just opened its first U.S. Research and Development Center in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, inside Technip Energies' own Advanced Materials and Catalysts research centre. This new site marks the relocation of Reju's core research team, previously based at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, where VolCat was first developed. Moving out of a partner's facility into your own space is a tell. It means you're not treating this like a pilot.

The Pennsylvania lab is where they refine the chemistry. Rochester is where they deploy it.

Governor Kathy Hochul announced that Reju has selected an 18.9-acre site at Eastman Business Park — the sprawling former Kodak campus on Rochester's east side — for a $390 million industrial regeneration hub. The facility will span 76,500 square metres and is designed to process the equivalent of 300 million garments per year. Operational by end of 2029, something like that. Around 70 direct jobs projected.

Kodak's collapse, as it happens, left Rochester with enormous ready-to-retrofit industrial infrastructure. The city has been recruiting advanced manufacturers to put it to use, and Reju fits that mould. Reju is also working with industry partners such as Goodwill in the U.S. to develop regional systems for collection and recycling, which suggests at least the beginnings of a local supply chain are being assembled rather than relying entirely on imported sorted waste.

Whether that supply chain actually works at scale is the question nobody can answer yet.

The legislation piece

Here's the context that makes the Rochester announcement more than just a factory story. California signed the Responsible Textile Recovery Act into law in September 2024, becoming the first U.S. state to introduce a mandatory Extended Producer Responsibility scheme for textiles. It requires brands to fund collection and recycling at end of life. New York is working on something similar — Senate Bill S3217 would require textile producers to submit state-approved plans for collection, reuse, recycling, and disposal of covered products. Washington state is considering its own version. None of this is law yet at the federal level, but the direction is fairly clear.

A company with 300-million-garment capacity sitting in New York State by 2029 is, shall we say, well-positioned if that legislation passes. Brands including H&M and Zara have already signed supply agreements with chemical recyclers in Europe partly to get ahead of similar rules there. Reju hasn't publicly disclosed its U.S. offtake agreements, but a $390 million facility doesn't get funded on vibes.

Why I'm writing about this here

Right.

Desi Bihari is about handloom. Natural fibres. Weavers who have been doing this for generations. We are, in almost every conceivable way, the opposite of what Reju is building in upstate New York.

But I keep coming back to the same thought. The crisis that Reju is trying to solve — a recycling rate of less than 1% in an industry that is the third most polluting after oil and gas and agriculture — that crisis was made by the same logic that has been squeezing handloom out of the market for decades. Make it cheap. Make it fast. Make it synthetic. Make it disposable.

Chemical recycling is not the solution to that. It's a very expensive, very impressive bandage on a wound that probably didn't need to be made in the first place.

The actual solution, as far as I can tell, involves buying less, buying better, and buying things made by people who know what they're doing. Handwoven cotton that you wear for ten years isn't a lifestyle choice. It's load-bearing infrastructure for a different kind of system entirely.

But I'll say this for Reju: at least they're trying to fix something real, not just greenwash it with a bottle.