How Ambercycle is helping fashion go circular

What happens to all of our old clothes? That’s the question that Ambercycle co-founders Shay Sethi and Moby Ahmed asked themselves when they were still at university.

After finding out about the sheer volume of textiles being produced and how little is recycled, they searched for a way for “the waste products of the past to become the resources for the future”.

But it was no easy problem to solve considering that most of the clothes in our closets are made of blended materials. Just think of your comfy jeans with all of that inbuilt stretch. It’s cotton mixed with polyester. This makes it very difficult to recycle as it means the materials must be separated from each other.

Sethi and Ahmed managed to develop a technique to do this, separating the polyester at a molecular level, and removing the dyes and additives to make new clothing from end-of-life textiles otherwise destined for landfill.

Today, ten years after founding Ambercycle, their recycled polyester was named one of Time magazine’s top inventions of 2024. They’ve also teamed up with big industry names like Danish fashion brand Ganni and sneakermaker Saucony and are set to open a full-scale facility that can process the textile-waste equivalent of 250,000 T-shirts per day. They admit that more solutions are needed, but at least it’s a start.

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