Blended fabric recycling is one of the hardest problems in fashion today. Most of our clothes are made from polyester-cotton blends (polycotton), and until now these blends could not be recycled at industrial scale. In 2026, two American start-ups, Circ and Ambercycle, are racing to solve this, each in a different way.

Why Blended Fabrics Are at the Heart of the Crisis

According to Circ, polyester-cotton blends make up about 77% of the global textile market, yet less than 1% of textiles are actually recycled into new textiles. The reason is technical: cotton is a plant fibre and polyester is a petroleum-based plastic, and once they are spun into the same yarn they are very hard to separate. Conventional recycling handles only pure cotton or pure polyester, so blended fabric ends up in landfill or incinerators. Circ says more than 90 million tonnes of clothing are burned or buried every year.

Circ: A “Pressure Cooker” That Separates Cotton from Polyester

Virginia-based Circ has developed a patented hydrothermal process that its COO describes as a “fancy pressure cooker for textiles”. Water, heat and controlled pressure break polyester down into its original chemical building blocks while preserving the cotton, which becomes cellulose pulp for new fibres. One blended garment therefore yields two new raw materials instead of none.

Circ has raised more than $100 million from investors including Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Inditex (owner of Zara), Zalando and Patagonia. It is building its first commercial plant in Saint-Avold, north-eastern France, an investment of around €450 million (about $500 million). The plant is designed to process roughly 70,000 tonnes of polycotton a year, with construction starting in 2026 and operations targeted for 2028. Circ calls it the world’s first facility engineered to recycle polycotton at industrial scale.

Circ materials have also reached the runways of London and Paris Fashion Weeks through designers Patrick McDowell and Niccolò Pasqualetti, and the company has launched TENCEL™ | Circ® with REFIBRA™ fibres with Lenzing.

Ambercycle: New Polyester from Old Clothes

Los Angeles-based Ambercycle, led by CEO Shay Sethi, focuses on polyester. Discarded textiles are sorted and shredded, fed into reactors that separate their components, and the polyester is purified and returned as new resin. The result is sold as cycora®, which the company says performs like virgin polyester and runs through standard spinning and weaving lines.

Its biggest deal is with Inditex, which committed in 2023 to buy a significant share of cycora production over three years for more than €70 million, helping fund Ambercycle’s first commercial plant. Since then, brands such as Reformation, GANNI, Gap’s Athleta, Arc’teryx and REI have signed on, along with major manufacturers including Hyosung, Shinkong and MAS Holdings. However, the company has not yet announced where or when its commercial plant will open.

Who Will Win the Race?

The two approaches differ: Circ is betting on unlocking the whole blend and recovering both cotton and polyester, while Ambercycle is betting on purified polyester as a premium material for sportswear and outdoor brands. The shared challenge is financing and running at industrial scale at a price that competes with virgin materials. The 2024 collapse of Sweden’s Renewcell is a reminder that technology alone is not enough. What drives the race now is new European textile-waste legislation and big-brand targets, such as Inditex’s goal of moving to lower-impact materials by 2030.

What Future Designers Can Learn

• Understand fibre composition: a care label reading 65% polyester / 35% cotton is no longer a technical detail; it decides what happens to the garment at the end of its life.
• Design for recycling: using fewer fibre types in one garment, and choosing threads and trims that are easy to remove, makes future recycling much easier.
• The new supplier language: names like cycora and TENCEL | Circ are appearing in big-brand briefs, and knowing them is a professional advantage.
• A story to tell: customers now ask where a material comes from, and a designer who can explain it clearly earns their trust.

Conclusion

Blended fabric recycling is moving from the lab to the factory, and 2026–2028 will show which technology works economically. At Anna Stella Academy, we believe that understanding materials, from fibre to finished garment, is the foundation of every successful fashion designer.