Textile innovators are taking this one step further, approaching this opportunity by developing “emission-to-textile,” a process in which textiles are produced using waste methane and carbon dioxide emissions.
The global synthetic fibers market was estimated at $61.4 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow to $88.5 billion in 2025.
Fairbrics, the company will be able to build a pilot line and increase production to 20 tons of fiber per year once they complete fundraising in 2021. This will be enough to manufacture approximately 100,000 garments. Although the technology behind these companies might sound futuristic, the technology behind Fairbrics and Mango Materials simulate natural processes by mimicking the work of plants, trees and even ancient bacteria.
Fairbrics uses solely CO2 emissions and water to replicate the natural process behind plant fiber. However, instead of sunlight, they use electricity to make polyesters.
Mango Materials utilizes bacteria which consume methane to produce biodegradable PHA. This has similar properties to traditional plastics and can be used in textile fibers to replace polyester.
Econic Technologies' technologies can be retrofitted into existing chemical manufacturing plants. This allows Econic to work with established chemical and textile manufacturers-instead of competing with them, as well as accelerating their cost-effectiveness. Econic is a developer of catalysts to enable production polycarbonate polyols from CO2 emissions
Newlight Technologies, a developer of polymerization technology to convert greenhouse gases into plastics and synthetics fibers
The incumbents in this space are oil, chemical and material manufacturing giants like German-based Covestro and Saudi Arabia-based Saudi Aramco. In July 2019, Covestro announced their own sustainable alternative to elastic fibers called “cardyon,” which is made with CO2-based thermoplastic polyurethane. Converge polyols technology takes waste CO2 and combines it with hydrocarbons to create polyols for a variety of applications, ranging from automotive, plastic and wood coatings to textiles and leathers.
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