Climate Week, meet Fashion Week

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Lindsey Hall

I’m Lindsey Hall.

Esther Whieldon

And I’m Esther Whieldon.

Lindsey Hall

Welcome to All Things Sustainable, a podcast from S&P Global. As your hosts, we’ll dive into all the sustainability topics that are reshaping the business world.

Esther Whieldon

Join us every Friday for in-depth analyses and interviews with leaders from around the globe. Together, we’ll break down big sustainability headlines and cut through the jargon.

Lindsey Hall

Welcome to Climate Week NYC 2025. This annual event started in 2009 and this year, runs September 21st through 28th. It’s always a big week for the sustainability world, convening thousands of stakeholders for hundreds of events across New York City. And in 2025 with so much uncertainty around climate and sustainability in the U.S., this week feels especially important.

Esther Whieldon

Join us all this week while we talk to sustainability leaders. And we're excited that the All Things Sustainable podcast from S&P Global is an official media partner of the Nest Climate Campus. This 3-day event during Climate Week takes place in New York City's Javits Center. Lindsey and I will be on site with a dedicated recording booth for all things sustainable, where we'll be talking to sustainability leaders on September 23, 24 and 25.

Lindsey Hall

This week, we want to understand how businesses are navigating the current sustainability landscape. And today's episode combines two of my favorite topics, sustainability and fashion. Anyone who knows me knows that fashion brings me joy, but how do you enjoy it responsibly? This is a question many people are asking at Climate Week NYC. And that's because the apparel sector is a significant source of global emissions.

In July, the Apparel Impact Institute released its annual apparel sector greenhouse gas emissions report. It found that in 2023, the most recent year available, apparel sector emissions increased 7.5% from the previous year. This marks the first significant increase since 2019 when the institute began calculating emissions.

And the report pointed to the rise of ultrafast fashion brands as a key contributor to this increase. So what can you do about this? One solution is circular business models like recycling, rental, resale and repair, which can displace the production of new apparel.

To learn more, I sat down on the sidelines at Climate Week NYC with the Co-Founder and CEO of U.S.-based circular fashion company, Circ. As we'll hear in the interview, Circ was a finalist for the Earthshot Prize, which each year awards GBP 1 million to 5 winners for their environmental solutions. Okay. Here's my conversation where our guest starts off by introducing himself.

 

Question and Answer

Peter Majeranowski

My name is Peter Majeranowski. I'm the CEO of Circ. Circ recycles clothing. And that sounds pretty straightforward and easy, but it's not. There's a lot of ingredients that make up our clothing, different fiber types, dyes, finishing chemistry, anti-wrinkle. So in a lot of ways, what our technology does is unbake a cake back to its building blocks, the eggs, the flower, the sugar, so it can go back into the supply chain to make new clothes without tapping natural resources.

Lindsey Hall

I love that analogy of baking a cake that really makes it simple to understand. Talk to me about what does that process look like.

Peter Majeranowski

Yes. So it's like a fancy pressure cooker where we take material, mainly cotton, polyester or polycotton blends. And those blends are the majority of fabrics produced today, very tricky to handle. And the way we do it is we shred it, put it into that fancy pressure cooker. And under those conditions, we're basically able to reverse the reaction that makes polyester.

And when you do that, you separate it away from the cotton. Our next set of technologies then how do you purify that cotton piece and those building blocks or monomers that make polyester so they can go back into the very beginning of the supply chain essentially as a drop-in replacement.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. Part of why I'm so excited to have this conversation, Peter, is because I am a big sustainability enthusiast, obviously, but also a huge fashion enthusiast. And I'm constantly wondering how do I make my fashion choices more sustainable, more responsible. Talk to me about why this is important, why is this a thing that we need to be paying attention to during Climate Week.

Peter Majeranowski

I think textiles and fashion is one of those climate sleepers that people don't really understand the impact or recognize it. Just the water to create a T-shirt, whether it's growing the cotton or dying it can sustain a human for 2 years. Yet in many ways, T-shirts have become somewhat disposable, and that's a problem. And as we add more people to the planet and as consumption continues to accelerate, not just increase, we have a resource issue.

And so circularity really needs to be there. And on top of a resource issue, we have an environmental impact issue where roughly 10% of annual greenhouse gas emissions come from textiles. That's more than aviation and marine combined. So we need to look at solutions. And the current solutions don't work. Less than 1% of clothing is recycled back into clothing today.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. So when you say current solutions don't work, talk to me about the whole ecosystem of circularity. A lot of times, when I think about circularity, I think about, okay, I'm going to clothing resale sites.

Peter Majeranowski

Yes, that's the best thing you could do right now is keep clothing for as long as possible, whether that's through repair or reselling or reuse. But when it can't be repaired or resold, it usually gets landfilled or incinerated, and that's the challenge.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. So talk to me about how did you come to create Circ? What was that process like?

Peter Majeranowski

It was a bit of an accident. And what I mean by that is we were working very hard on a completely different problem set of trying to create an ideal biofuel crop, and we had a process for managing the biomass out of that crop. When oil prices dropped and nobody wanted to invest in biofuels anymore, we had to figure something out, and we figured out textile recycling.

So that was back in 2018. Since then, we scaled our process out of the lab to where we are today at the demo scale, and we just recently announced our first large-scale site in Eastern France.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. And I understand you're actually leaving New York tomorrow to go to France. Tell me more about what should we expect from this France development?

Peter Majeranowski

Yes. So I'm going tomorrow to France as part of the public consultation process, very important for the permitting of this first site. What we should expect in France is a world's first polycotton recycling facility, about 70,000 tons per year, investment of around USD 500 million, but it's really just a drop in the ocean, and we plan to use that as our flagship to copy and paste the solution around the world.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. And your existing operations, if I understand correctly, are actually in Danville, Virginia.

Peter Majeranowski

That's right.

Lindsey Hall

Not too far from my hometown, actually.

Peter Majeranowski

Yes. Danville, Virginia has a very rich textile history. Dan River Mills used to be based there. And so we're very proud to put Danville back on the map in a circular way for fashion, but that's where we run our current demo operations and most of our R&D team live.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. So talk to me about some of the challenges that you face. The idea that you've described to me so far, it sounds very smart, very straightforward. Why wouldn't everyone want to do this? What are the hurdles?

Peter Majeranowski

The hurdles are that we are existing in a really optimized industry where price is everything. And we're competing with Asian suppliers who have become very, very, very good at scaling solutions, but also have a considerable amount of state-sponsored, zero interest loans, et cetera, that really lower their cost basis.

And the brands and ultimately, the consumers really don't want to pay that much more. And so trying to turn around such an old and optimized system to try to use new materials and next-generation materials is a challenge, but we are making headway, and that's what keeps me very motivated.

Lindsey Hall

You also noted to me when we were chatting before this that the textile industry is very entrenched. They've been doing things a certain way for a long time. Talk to me about how do you work with some of these incumbents in the space?

Peter Majeranowski

Yes, fashion really started the industrial revolution. So that's how old it is, and that's how optimized it is. And so we really have to put ourselves in other people's shoes, basically different nodes of the supply chain.

So what are the challenges that fashion brands are facing? Why should they adopt these next-generation materials? What about their supply chain? Why should they also adopt next-generation materials and really work together. We like to say circularity is a team sport, and it truly is. You cannot innovate in fashion if you're not involved in the supply chain.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. Can you talk to me about what some of that work with those other stakeholders in your supply chain? What does that work look like?

Peter Majeranowski

Yes. I think a lot of people don't realize that brands don't own their supply chain, and they're very far from the raw materials where we sit in the supply chain. So it's essential between us and the brands that we connect all the dots.

So we work with spinners that make the yarn, and we work with the fabric companies that make the knits or wovens and the dye houses and then ultimately, what's called the tier ones, the companies that cut and sew the final products for the brands. We have to connect those dots, so we create a big easy button for brands so they can adopt this material more readily.

Lindsey Hall

And as you're thinking about the sort of trajectory for Circ, what are you hoping to achieve, say, over the next 5 years, I guess, starting with this development in France that you've told us about?

Peter Majeranowski

Yes. So 0 to 1, building that first large-scale facility is job one. It's super important because it shows that it's possible, that it works, and we continue to build out the supply chain and get more traction with the brands. But from there, we want to go to 2 to 4 to 8 to really have that exponential tipping point where we can make every closet having circular materials.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. And how do I, as a consumer, know if I'm making responsible choices with my fashion? Or how do I know right now today, if the things that might cause it are responsibly made?

Peter Majeranowski

It's really hard. That's the unfortunate answer. It's getting better, but what I encourage people to do is to really read their labels and see what their clothing is made from. Clothes is a lot like food. No one really knows who makes it, where it's made, how it's made, what it's made from. The majority of our clothing is made from oil.

And we really need to start looking at recycled materials as an alternative to natural resources. So I also encourage people to look for recycled content. Now right now, that generally means old plastic bottles that are going into clothing. That's a good starting point. But true textile to textile recycling is the way to go, and I hope your listeners now pay attention to those labels and look for textile to textile recycle.

Lindsey Hall

Are you seeing more of these kind of conversations happen in the fashion space about sustainability?

Peter Majeranowski

More and more, they are happening, but not fast enough, in my opinion. I think we're still waiting for that big aha moment where the average consumer recognizes exactly what's going on. Most people don't realize that 30% of clothing produced never is sold.

It's just there so that we have your size, your color, wherever you shop, the convenience factor is there. That's extremely linear, extremely wasteful. We can do better. We now have all kinds of digital tools to help us do that as well as new technologies like Circ that can help us recycle and repurpose that material.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. And so what are the big challenges or hurdles that you face in a technical way with the work that you're trying to do at Circ?

Peter Majeranowski

From a technical point of view, largely everything has been solved. It's now the business problems that keep me up at night. And what I mean by that is how do I unlock the financing. There's plenty of capital that wants to go into this field. It's a great business model. You're converting waste into value.

But for the bankers to get involved, they want to see long-term commitments from the brands. And that's a muscle that just does not exist in this industry. That's the biggest challenge. And it's not just for Circ. It's for sustainable dies. It's for new business models. It's for anything emerging in new technologies with fashion, the finance community really wants to see the brands involved. And for the brands, that's very challenging.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. So am I hearing you correctly that both the financers and the brands are sort of on the sidelines waiting to see who's going to make the first move?

Peter Majeranowski

Yes, more or less. And I think the challenge with fashion, for example, is it's not like cars or smartphones where you have 4 or 5 manufacturers that control 80% of the market or 4 or 5 brands have 80% of the market. It's exactly the opposite.

So for a brand, I think they want to be a fast follower, but they don't want to go first, and they certainly feel very nervous about locking into a 5-year or 10-year purchase commitment, which is common when you look at how solar started or what's going on with sustainable aviation fuel today.

But for fashion, that feels like a bridge too far for a lot of brands. So we're working on borrowing from solar, for example, of trying to create buying clubs where you can lower that risk and you spread that risk around to multiple brands. So it doesn't feel like a huge leap for them to make those commitments.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. It certainly that plethora of brands is very apparent where we are. We're just a few blocks off of Fifth Avenue here in Madison Avenue here in New York City. Also, we're here at Climate Week NYC, but Fashion Week was just last week in New York. What are some of the conversations that you're having with players in the fashion space?

Peter Majeranowski

Everybody right now, it's how come this is not scaling or why isn't it scaling faster? And I think the brands and other parts of the ecosystem are really putting a mirror up to the problem and saying, "What's wrong structurally that this is not happening faster?" And so those conversations are imperative. And I'm really glad that Circ gets to have a voice in that.

Lindsey Hall

New York Fashion Week just happened. And now we're on to London Fashion Week. What should our audience know about Circ's presence at London Fashion Week?

Peter Majeranowski

Yes. So this weekend in London, we made a fashion history with the designer, Patrick McDowell, who incorporated recycled polyester made from Circ's process and 2 looks that went down the runway. So we're really excited to be partnering with Patrick.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. Excellent. And is this the first time that you had a presence at Fashion Week in that kind of way?

Peter Majeranowski

No. Actually, in this city, New York City, last year, we had 2 looks go down the runway with Christian Siriano, that was made from recovered cotton. So we're very proud to now have recycled cotton and recycled polyester, both at New York and London Fashion Week.

Lindsey Hall

So this is not something that's just for the sort of high street brands like your Zara and your H&M. It's also these oatcouture fashion designers.

Peter Majeranowski

Absolutely. And that's what's so fun for me, just being the technical nerd that I am because I know that it's all coming from the same dirty, dusty, multicolor feedstock. It runs through our process and can ultimately become a USD 5,000 or USD 10,000 piece or be a USD 50 piece. It's a very versatile technology, and it's not just for high fashion, it's for everyday wear as well.

Lindsey Hall

I've asked you a lot of questions so far. What questions am I not asking that you think are important for people who maybe for the first time are thinking about sustainable fashion or recycling of textiles?

Peter Majeranowski

Yes. I think the big thing is when I talk about circularity, it's always from the material point of view, but we're not thinking about the 90 million tons or so that go to landfill or incineration every year, and it's starting to be a burden for waste management systems in the U.S., but also around the world.

And so I think there's an externality here that is not getting priced in, which is the cost of dealing with that waste. A lot of it is getting shipped to the Global South. A lot of it ends up in oceans or in deserts. We need to really quantify that cost and address it and make sure that we're also looking at this from a waste management perspective.

Lindsey Hall

Right now, it does feel a bit like a bit of out of sight, out of mind kind of problem for a lot of us here sitting in the U.S. just consuming fashion. How do you change that behavior?

Peter Majeranowski

I think one of the most effective tools for changing that consumption behavior is something called an EPR or extended producer responsibility tax. California just passed it. It's going to go into effect in 2 years. Europe has already put it into force. France has the oldest EPR scheme, one of the reasons why we went to France.

But essentially, what that is, it's like when you buy tires for a car and there's a disposal fee, it's basically at the point of purchase, that new garment, a little bit of that purchase price is going into a central fund that deals with the repair, the reuse and the recycling for the end of use of that garment.

And that is a really powerful tool to ensure that we're quantifying those costs. So we're not putting the burden on taxpayers and landfill systems around the world. Those EPR schemes also usually have a carrot or a reward.

So if a brand is using recycled material, there's less of a tax. And that also creates a great market for these new generation -- next-generation materials. And I think that's going to be a key tool or a key unlock to really accelerate the incorporation of recycled materials.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. I hear a lot on this podcast in my interviews about the important role that policy and regulation play in creating an enabling environment. And it sounds like the same is true for the fashion industry.

Peter Majeranowski

Absolutely. And I think it goes back to the fact that it is such a fragmented, not concentrated industry that a lot of the brands want to move forward in lockstep with other brands. They want a level playing field. And so I think when you have a situation like this where there are so many different players, having regulation create that level playing field makes sense.

But we have to be careful because oftentimes with regulation, good intentions might end up actually having the opposite effect. So I think it's very important that policymakers continue to talk to industry innovators, investors to make sure we're creating the right set of rules.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. And let me ask you a very basic question, if you don't mind, just about the mechanics of recycling. When you're taking these textiles to recycle, are you turning them only into other textiles? Or are they also being recycled into other kinds of products?

Peter Majeranowski

Yes, that's a great question. So there are a lot of streams that textiles can go to. Already some are being used for something called shoddy fiber. So if you look for your spare tire in your car, you'll see this acoustic paneling fiber is material, it's usually dark-ish, black-ish gray with multicolors. That's shoddy fiber or insulation and housing or for filler in cushions or pillows.

So those are lower-value applications. There are some technologies that can convert that into construction bricks, which is also an interesting outlet. But for us, our process, our outputs are a high-purity cellulose that typically comes from trees or cotton and monomers, terephthalic acid and monoethylene glycol, which typically come from the oil or chemicals industry.

But those are building blocks to a lot of high-value products, not just apparel and textiles. So yes, we're also looking at those streams. We're working with the automotive industry, for example, looking at how we can incorporate our recovered material into new products for their applications.

Lindsey Hall

Peter, you've told me a little bit about the back story behind Circ. Whenever we have CEOs on this podcast, I love to ask about their back story. It sounds like you didn't set out to become a CEO of a circular fashion company.

Peter Majeranowski

Yes. So I was fortunate to go to college on the Navy scholarship. And strangely, the Navy is where my passion for the environment started. I spent a lot of time on the water, I could see the impact of humanity on our oceans. One of my first collateral duties was boarding ships, smuggling oil out of Iraq.

And so that planted the seed about biofuels, which is essentially how Circ started. We were called Tyton BioSciences back there. And so when I got out of the Navy, I worked in finance for a little bit, Great Recession came, I really wanted to build something.

And a family friend approached me with this cool biofuel technology and I was in. It was the worst time to try to raise money for basic science, early-stage venture companies, but we figured it out. We did. Thanks to the Commonwealth of Virginia and their R&D fund through their Tobacco Commission, we got funding and we started. That's why we're in Danville.

And then when we had to pivot because biofuels was just not getting investment anymore, we figured out that we can use textile recycling. And at the time, we didn't know if it was even a big problem. And thanks to a white paper from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, we recognized this is a huge problem.

And shortly after it became known that we had this solution, we started getting cold calls from major brands like Patagonia, one of our investors. And then I knew as an entrepreneur, we had a solution that fit the market need, and we focused all our attention on textile scaling and textile recycling.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. And then eventually, from that foundation, you became one of the finalists for the Earthshot Prize. How did that come about?

Peter Majeranowski

Yes. When the Earthshot Prize was first announced by Your Royal Highness, Prince William. We were enamored. We were excited. We were thinking this is exactly what the planet needs, not just for apparel and textiles, but for all solutions.

And it was maybe 3 years later that one of our investors, a nominator, asked us, Mills Fabrica, to if we would apply if they nominated us and we certainly said yes. We went through the process. It's pretty extensive, which is good, a lot of due diligence, and we were just so honored to be named the finalist about 2 years ago.

And it's been a wonderful experience for us. What I think a lot of people don't really recognize about the Earthshot Prize is the community that you become a part of and all the services and support that the Earthshot team gives you to ensure that you succeed or have the best shot at succeeding. And so that's been a wonderful part of this journey.

Lindsey Hall

So Patagonia is one of those investors. Any other investors that you can disclose or talk about?

Peter Majeranowski

Sure. So from the fashion retail side, Inditex, the parent of Zara, is one of our investors. Zalando, the largest fashion online retailer in Europe is one of our investors. We have a lot of supply chain companies, Millican in the U.S. -- they have a global presence -- Avery Dennison.

And then we have traditional investors like Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is Bill Gates' climate fund. And so we're really proud to have this excellent group of investors that cover the pure financial world, the branding retail world as well as the manufacturing supply chain world.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. So it sounds like there is a role for a lot of different stakeholders to kind of advance solutions in this space like Circa is trying to do.

Peter Majeranowski

That's right. Circularity is definitely a team sport, and we need all those to come together. And I think 5, 6 years ago, the industry was saying we want these solutions. Well, now the solutions are here, and we're at an inflection point.

And I think the industry is having a hard time figuring out exactly how to get to that last step so that you can unlock the financing and meet the desires of regulators. And so it's a very interesting and critical moment right now for sustainable fashion.

Lindsey Hall

What needs to happen to really rise the challenge of that inflection point?

Peter Majeranowski

It goes back to the long-term demand signals. The financiers want to know that if we build it, they will come. And they want to take that risk off the table. So they'd like to see multiyear purchase agreements from the brands to pull our materials through that whole supply chain.

We're working through that. I think the key will be through some collaborative mechanism like we saw with other fields, whether it's vaccines, energy, you name it, in order to really break through that friction and get this stuff scaled.

Lindsey Hall

Okay. Are you seeing anything that excites you when it comes to that kind of collaboration? Is that happening anywhere in little pockets in the industry?

Peter Majeranowski

Yes, there are certainly industry groups that are coming together to address this, Fashion for Good, Textile Exchange, Canopy, those are all really proactive at recognizing what the challenges are but also bringing people together to overcome them.

And we've also seen individual brands making those purchase commitments. H&M has made some, Lululemon and some others. And so I see that as a very positive sign. And a lot of times with this industry, we see that there's a follower mentality. So as a few bold brands take leadership positions, others quickly follow.

Lindsey Hall

Today, we heard about the environmental impacts of the apparel industry and how Circ promotes circularity by recycling clothing. Peter said a lot of the technical challenges around recycling have been solved, and it's actually the business problems that keep them awake at night.

He said bankers want long-term commitments from brands, but big fashion companies don't want to be the first movers. And that's where the policy and regulatory environment can really play an enabling role.

Esther Whieldon

Please stay tuned as we bring you more special coverage from Climate Week NYC.

Lindsey Hall

Thanks for tuning for this episode of All Things Sustainable, If you like what you heard, please subscribe, share and leave us a review wherever you get your podcast.

Esther Whieldon

And special thanks to our agency partner, The 199. See you next time.