Textile recycling sounds simple until you touch real post-consumer waste. It’s not just cotton and polyester. It’s elastane blends, heat-transfer logos, dyes, heavy metals, and PFAS that can derail downstream processing and destroy product quality. From Brussels, we sit down with Charlotte and Ditte from Denmark-based Dissolver to unpack a different angle on chemical textile recycling: don’t break the polymers if you don’t have to, clean them.

We walk through Dissolver’s modular, selective solvent approach for contaminant removal and why “designed for complexity” matters more than perfect feedstock. They explain how their process targets disruptors module by module, how solvent recovery works (their “washing dishes” analogy makes it click), and why keeping polyester intact can avoid some of the energy and refining burden seen in depolymerization routes. We also get practical about the messy middle of the value chain: what sorting is realistic, why Dissolver starts from shredded fibers, and the open question of who should own hard-part removal across a new recycling infrastructure.

Then we zoom out to scaling. Dissolver shares plans for an industrial pilot built to de-risk unit economics and prove off-take with spinners, plus a second path where individual modules can plug into other recyclers’ plants as preprocessing. We talk about siting decisions, Europe’s policy tailwinds, Asia’s gravity in textile manufacturing, and why the next decade likely brings both collaboration and consolidation across technologies.

If you care about circular fashion, fiber-to-fiber recycling, PFAS removal, elastane challenges, and what it takes to build real industrial capacity, hit play. Subscribe, share this with someone in the textile value chain, and leave a review telling us which part of textile recycling you think is hardest to scale.

Contact Us

This is interactive content - send us your questions to the guests and we record another session just focusing on your questions!

You have suggestions for new guests or want to sponsor the show?

• Contact Carl via LinkedIn

Thanks for listening and keep podcasting!

Vinyl is back, but the way we make records is stuck in an older industrial playbook. Carl joins us from our LA studio to explain how a booming physical format collides with modern climate expectations, from PVC-based materials to shrink wrap and global shipping that drags out release timelines for artists who want their music out now. If you care about sustainable manufacturing, circular economy ideas, and the future of music merch, this conversation gets surprisingly concrete.

We follow Carl’s journey from touring and producing to founding Good Neighbor, then dig into the technology shift that makes their approach different: injection-molded PET records developed with Green Vinyl Records in the Netherlands. We talk energy use, why moving away from natural gas-heavy pressing matters, and how rPET opens the door to turning recycled bottles into high-quality records. Just as important, we get into the unglamorous parts of climate tech in the music industry: fundraising, hardware costs, pricing pressure, and why “green” only works if the product still sounds incredible.

From there, we zoom out to the bigger vision: cleaner packaging, fewer plastics, smarter merch, and even a festival-to-factory loop where local cups and bottles could become records tied to the show you just watched. We also close with a great behind-the-scenes Billie Eilish moment that captures how unpredictable creative careers can be. If you want more stories like this at the intersection of entertainment and sustainability, subscribe, share this with a friend who buys vinyl, and leave us a review.

Contact Us

This is interactive content - send us your questions to the guests and we record another session just focusing on your questions!

You have suggestions for new guests or want to sponsor the show?

• Contact Carl via LinkedIn

Thanks for listening and keep podcasting!

A recycling breakthrough is useless if it never reaches real scale and Syre is betting everything on getting there fast. From Syre’s office in Stockholm, we talk with CEO Dennis about why they chose polyester as the first target, why their mission is “speed and scale,” and why they believe the textile industry needs industrial capacity now, not a decade from now.

We dig into Syre’s unusually customer-driven origin story and how off-take agreements change the rules of the game. Dennis shares how commitments from global brands like H&M, Nike, and Target help unlock project financing for a first-of-its-kind Vietnam facility targeting 150,000 metric tons of circular PET output. We also talk honestly about what makes this hard: chemical-plant ramp-up, purification challenges, and the reality that post-consumer collection and sorting systems still lag behind the demand for recycled polyester.

On the technology and strategy side, Dennis walks through Syre’s glycolysis-based chemical recycling approach, why they prioritize polyester-rich feedstock, and why they shifted toward an orchestration model that partners with best-in-class providers rather than trying to invent every step in-house. We also get into why Vietnam matters for circular textiles, how regulation around textile waste imports can make or break scale, and what a global expansion roadmap could look like as legislation and demand accelerate.

If you care about textile-to-textile recycling, circular economy supply chains, sustainable fashion, and the future of recycled polyester at industrial scale, this conversation will give you a clear view of what it takes to execute. Subscribe, share this with someone building in climate and materials, and leave a review with your biggest question about scaling circular textiles.

Contact Us

This is interactive content - send us your questions to the guests and we record another session just focusing on your questions!

You have suggestions for new guests or want to sponsor the show?

• Contact Carl via LinkedIn

Thanks for listening and keep podcasting!