JASON E. KAPLAN What does your operation look like right now in 2023? You’ve caught us in another evolution of our business. The first thing we started out with was what’s called pre-consumer excess: That’s the stuff that gets left over in manufacturing. The second step of that was post-consumer, in which another key partner, Southwest Airlines, came to us and said, “Hey, we just renovated our entire fleet, and we put in new seats so that they would be lighter, so we save on fuel, and we have 43 acres’ worth of leather. Can you do something with this?” Then we evolved into downcycling. The whole goal all along was, “How do you make the T-shirt back into the T-shirt?” We said, “OK, we can take these materials and we can turn them into recycled fiber for the non-woven market” — things like insulation, stuffing, hard fibers. At the same time, we started doing a lot more research and process with circularity and trying to use different technologies, to be able to convert materials back into fiber for spinning, to create yarn so you can make new products today. At this particular moment, our organization looks like a combination of pre- and post-consumer upcycling and downcycling, and we’re in the process right now of building out a new facility that will be the first of its kind: a complete textile circularity facility. Think of a municipal recycling facility for textiles. So that is our next big move. That’s what we’re working on right now, taking possession of a building in November and starting to build out the process from there. Have you figured out a way to turn a T-shirt back into a T-shirt? That’s what our new facility will be doing. We turn it back from a fiber into recycled yarn, and then from the recycled yarn you build a fabric, and from the fabric you build the T-shirt. We won’t house that entire supply chain under one roof, but we will be able to provide the feedstock in certain cases, the yarn for other companies to be able to build that out. You’ve said this is where you were hoping to be 10 years into the company’s existence. Where do you hope to see things head five, 10 years from now? We’re going to need more of these facilities around the country and around the world in order to tackle the problem that’s out there. Here in the U.S., we landfill about 17 million tons of textiles every single year. A lot of those are underutilized; it’s a wasted resource. Less than 1% of those are actually getting converted back into clothing. We look to expand to multiple facilities in order to be able to have a much larger impact on that industry. 15
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