DENVER, CO / ACCESS Newswire / February 18, 2025 / Tereform, a textile recycling startup specializing in circularity for hard-to-recycle materials, today announced a $1.25 million investment led by AccelR8 with participation from Toyota Ventures, marking a major milestone in the company's mission to transform textile-to-textile waste recycling.
This funding will accelerate the scaleup of Tereform's chemical process for recycling synthetic material in the automotive apparel, and home-goods industries. The co-founding team developed Tereform's process while they were researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This process is designed to deconstruct challenging textile materials into their chemical building blocks before re-making them back into polymer, yarn, and fabric. Tereform's proprietary process uses oxygen and biobased solvents to break down synthetic textiles containing complex additives, like spandex, prints, finishes, and dyes-materials that have previously been challenging to recycle efficiently. This approach enables the creation of recycled polymers from waste textiles while maintaining competitive costs and reducing greenhouse gas emissions compared to new plastic production.
"The two most significant obstacles to scaling textile-to-textile recycling are the labor- and time-intensive nature of pre-processing and the absence of existing technologies to handle mixed feedstocks," said Lisa Coca, Climate Fund partner at Toyota Ventures. "By addressing both challenges, Tereform's technology has the ability to unlock the full climate potential of recycling textiles by reducing the overall impact of textile manufacturing and downstream impacts from the disposal of clothing. We are confident in the team's ability to tackle this challenge and look forward to supporting them on their mission to enable circularity within the fashion and textile industries."
Tereform has been recognized by the H&M Foundation with a Global Change Award for its ability to process challenging blends of textiles, such as polyester/spandex materials. They are currently working with several brand partners to scale the process using both postconsumer and postindustrial waste.
"A significant portion of plastic waste is blended with other polymers, yet the ability to recycle such blends is an unmet need. Historically, this challenge has been due to the inability to fully depolymerize each of the polymers," said Megan Phelan, Associate at AccelR8, who led the funding round. "Tereform's novel process addresses this challenge. The team has successfully demonstrated the ability to separate - and recover - various polymers in complex textile blends. We are confident in the team's ability to continue to demonstrate high quality, cost-competitive products and look forward to supporting them throughout their journey to close the loop in the textile industry."
With this new investment, Tereform is now outfitting a pilot facility to increase the process scale and produce prototype garments made from fully textile-to-textile recycled materials. They are also looking towards expanding the team as they grow their operational capabilities.
"This investment is a crucial step in our mission to enable postconsumer textile recycling at a competitive price" said Kevin Sullivan, Tereform's co-founder and CEO. "We are so thrilled and excited to work with AccelR8 and Toyota Ventures to help scale our technology towards bringing a recycled textile product to market."
About Tereform
Founded in 2022, Tereform is pioneering a new chemical recycling technology that recycles mixed-material waste textiles from hard-to-recycle streams. Based in Denver, Colorado, the process was developed by scientists as a part of the Department of Energy's BOTTLE Consortium, and spun out of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory through the West Gate accelerator program. To learn more about Tereform, please visit https://www.tereform.com/.
Contact
Kevin Sullivan, CEO & Co-Founder
Info@Tereform.com
www.tereform.com
SOURCE: Tereform, Inc.
View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire
