What would you guess if I asked you what percentage of all textiles gets recycled and fed back into making new clothes, today? If you guessed 1%, you are right. I think that is a shockingly low number.

Today we showcase a company working on solving this problem.

My guest today is Erik Koep. Erik is the CEO of Worn Again Technologies. Based in Nottingham in the United Kingdom, Worn Again Technologies has developed a technology that recaptures raw materials from non-reusable products such as textiles and polyester bottles and packaging, to produce dual PET and cellulose outputs, thereby putting sustainable resources back into production supply chains.

We dive into this today. We’ll also talk about the size of the textile recycling problem (or rather lack of) and the different stakeholders in this little known but important value chain.

Worn Again recently raised $30M in funding to scale from R&D to operations and build their first demo plant in Switzerland.

Why Switzerland, you ask? Well, listen to find out.

A founder and entrepreneur with a unique ability to blend technology and industrial insights into successful commercial ventures, Erik brings a mix of academic and real-world experience with a track record of leading teams through research phases to high-volume manufacturing.

I hope you enjoy my discussion with Erik Koep.