MacroCycle found a shortcut for plastic recycling — catch it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

Plastic recycling has decreased. only about 9% All plastics are recycled globally, which sounds pretty bad until you compare it to textiles. only 0.5% Among them is recycling.

The biggest challenge is that textiles are rarely a single material. Buttons and zippers complicate matters, but spandex is worse. Innovative synthetic blends make for garments that are a dream to wear but a nightmare to recycle.

“The challenge with recycling is that you can never predict your waste,” says Stuart Peña Feliz, co-founder and CEO. macrocycleTechCrunch said. “There are an infinite number of contaminants in your waste.”

Macrocycle has developed such a shortcut, which promises to make recycled plastic as cheap as virgin material. The startup has developed a way to extract desirable synthetic fibers from waste textiles, leaving everything else behind. Macrocycle is a Top 20 finalist Startup battlefield and is presented TechCrunch disrupts In San Francisco.

Peña Feliz knows well the potential harm of plastic recycling. Earlier in his career, he helped run ExxonMobil’s chemical recycling plant, which uses heat to break down plastics into simpler hydrocarbons. It works, but the process is energy intensive and emits a lot of carbon dioxide.

“I saw it firsthand and knew something had to be done,” he said.

Soon after he left Exxon, Pena Feliz decided to pursue an MBA at MIT. There, he met Jan-Georg Rosenboom, who as a postdoc had developed a novel way to recycle plastics. “When I saw his technology, I thought it was too good to be true,” Pena Feliz said.

The pair began turning that technology into a business in the fall of 2022 The following spring, they were selected for a Breakthrough Energy Fellowship to develop it further “We looked at each other and said, ‘I think we’ve been doing this the whole time,'” Pena Feliz said. Macrocycle raised a $6.5 million seed round earlier this year.

To understand plastic recycling, it helps to know a little about the chemistry of the material. Plastics are polymers, which are long chains of monomers, or repeating chemical building blocks. Most chemical recycling processes break down plastic polymers into smaller components, including monomers, so they can then be remade into something distinguishable from virgin plastic.

Macrocycle is different because it does not break down the polymer. Instead, it loops the polymer chains back on themselves, forcing them into rings called macrocycles. These macrocycles are left behind as various solvents wash away the contaminants, which themselves can be recycled. Later, the rings are reopened to reform the polymer chain. “Because they want the rings to fuse together, and in polyester, the longer the polymer, the higher the quality,” Peña Feliz said.

“Without having to go through all these steps again, we were able to adopt a significantly more energy efficient approach,” he added. He said the macrocycle process uses 80% less energy than needed to make virgin polyester, while other chemical recycling processes use 20% to 30% less.

The startup is in the process of installing a larger reactor, which is 2,000 times larger than the one they used two and a half years ago, Peña Feliz said. It is large enough to produce 100 kilogram (220 lb) batches of material for customers to sample. Macrocycle is generating revenue from fashion brands interested in the technology, he said.

“We are comfortable being one of the few, if not the only, public chemical recyclers that can claim that we can supply this material with price parity after we build our first industrial facility,” said Feliz Peña.

He is convinced that this is the only way for recycled plastics to replace fossil fuels in the industry. “The bottom line drives a lot of innovation, and if you want players like ExxonMobil to change the way they do things, it’s not going to happen from within,” he said. “I want to be able to create a technology that is economically attractive enough that the opportunity cost for them not to adopt this new type of solution is really high.”

If you want to hear directly from Macrocycle, and watch dozens of additional pitches, attend valuable workshops, and make connections that drive business results, Go here to learn more about this year’s disruptionHeld in San Francisco from October 27 to 29.