One company that I am especially excited about and would invest in today in the climate space is the Israel based Seed company, Re-Fresh Global. The fashion industry is estimated to over produce products by 30% each season, contributes to 10% of global carbon emissions, and contributes to about 7% of global landfill space. Re-Fresh has developed a method to increase the efficiency of recycling textile waste back into pure ethanol and cellulose raw materials that can be upcycled into future products. Their core technologies include automatic sorting of textile waste, given that sorting of textile waste into similar fiber types is one of the major hurdles within this space. After sorting, Re-Fresh uses a chemical process to break the textiles down into ethanol and cellulose. Utilizing a machine learning and chemistry approach to tackle such a problem allows them to convert textiles into pure chemicals that can be upcycled. However, there are inherent risks with the technology, especially when it comes to the cost of scaling. While I don’t know the specifics surrounding the current cost to run this process, I am optimistic about their approach as the end products they create through their recycling process provide them with multiple industries that they can sell to including luxury industries such as fashion and cosmetics. Factors that I would be curious to learn more about include their methods of sourcing their raw materials (waste products) and whether their sorting platform and recycling platforms can be decoupled. Further, while they highlight having multiple textile sources as being a key limiting factor for previous recycling methods, I would be curious to learn about how their recycling process performs when considering other pollutants that may be present in textiles such as plastics, dyes, and finishes. Finally, they claim to use a chemical-based recycling method and I would be curious how this compares to bio based enzyme approaches that are also being developed (Envirobe).
This excerpt was originally written as part of my application to Orca Climate Fund for a Venture Capital Intern position. I actually landed the position and was able to dive deep into the textile manufacturing space. I wrote an article laying out the innovations in textile manufacturing today that will be posted on Orca's social media soon. I also had the privilege of interacting with the co-founders of Re-Fresh Global during my internship.
