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New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack
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🌊 Can Fashion Break Free From Fossil Fuels?
How Syntetica plans to turn the textile industry’s most complex waste into a scalable source of new materials.
We’re joined by Marco Bertone, CEO and co-founder of Syntetica, a circular chemistry company building technology to recycle blended nylon waste.
Fresh off a $30 million funding round, Marco is working on a problem few companies have been able to solve: recovering high-quality nylon from garments made with multiple fibres, colours and coatings.
The scale of the challenge is difficult to ignore.
More than 100 billion garments are produced every year. Many are worn only seven to ten times, while roughly 92 billion garments end up in landfill or incineration.
In this episode, we unpack why the textile recycling system remains fundamentally broken — and what it takes to build a circular alternative that can compete with fossil-based materials on quality, performance and price.
In our conversation, we covered:
→ Why fast fashion created a waste problem that consumer behaviour alone will not solve
→ Why blended fabrics make textile recycling radically more difficult than recycling bottles
→ How Syntetica separates nylon 6 and nylon 6,6 from cotton, polyester, elastane and coatings
→ Why low-temperature, low-pressure chemistry could unlock competitive unit economics
→ What it takes to finance a first-of-a-kind chemical facility
→ How partnerships with Michelin, Lululemon, Uniqlo, MAS Holdings and other industry players help de-risk the path to scale
→ Why recycled materials must reach price parity with virgin nylon to become truly mainstream
Marco also shares what he had to learn moving from marketing into chemistry, industrial operations and project finance — and why the long-term ambition extends far beyond textiles.
The bigger goal: prove that a century of fossil-based production can be replaced by genuinely scalable circular technology.
✨ Leave a review and share the episode if this conversation challenged the way you think about growth, innovation, and sustainability.
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