Green tie-ups: Samsara Eco/lululemon to tackle textile recycling; Indorama Ventures/Sipa launch sustainable PET sparkling wine bottle

Australian enviro-tech start-up Samsara Eco is partnering with athletic apparel brand lululemon. This multi-year collaboration will scale circularity through textile-to-textile recycling, and see Samsara Eco create the world’s first infinitely recycled nylon 6,6 and polyester. Together, the two companies will create new recycled nylon and polyester made from apparel waste, bringing to life lower-impact alternatives to important materials in the performance apparel industry.

Nylon and polyester make up roughly 60% of clothing produced today. Globally, around 87% of discarded textiles either end up in landfill, incinerated or leak into the environment, until now, there’s been no method of recycling it.

Samsara Eco’s innovation is an important milestone in tackling plastic pollution and carbon emissions caused by textiles, helping reduce the world’s reliance on fossil fuels and addressing the climate crisis. It means Samsara Eco can now break down mixed apparel derived from plastic to its core molecules, which can then be used to recreate brand-new apparel again and again.

“We’re proud that this partnership is disrupting the apparel industry. The ability to infinitely recycle textiles, including nylon, is an essential solution to tackle the enormous challenge of textile waste in the apparel industry. Together with Lululemon, Samara Eco is creating enzymatically recycled nylon and accelerating textile-to-textile recycling toward truly circular apparel. This is a massive milestone as Samsara Eco achieves an environmentally friendly ability to recycle blended textiles including nylon and polyester,” explains Paul Riley, CEO and Founder of Samsara Eco.

“Nylon remains our biggest opportunity to achieve our 2030 sustainable product goals. This partnership demonstrates what’s possible through collective innovation to solve unmet needs. Through Samsara Eco’s patented enzymatic process, we’re advancing transforming apparel waste into high quality nylon and polyester, which will help us live into our end-to-end vision of circularity,” says Yogendra Dandapure, Vice President, Raw Materials Innovation at lululemon.

This represents lululemon’s first-ever minority investment in a recycling company, and Samsara Eco’s first partnership within the apparel industry. Following its US$56 million Series A funding round last year, the partnership and investment from lululemon comes as Samsara Eco gears up for commercialisation to bring the potential of infinite recycling to the fashion industry. It is a key milestone for Samsara Eco’s roadmap to recycle 1.5 million tonnes/year of plastics by 2030.

In other news, in what the partners say is the world’s first, Thailand-based chemical firm Indorama Ventures Public Company Limited and Sipa, an Italian PET packaging technology specialist, have collaborated to bring to market a monolayer PET sparkling wine bottle.

The award-winning PET packaging solution for sparkling wine provides brands with a fully recyclable option that maximizes logistics efficiencies, minimizes handling risks, runs on existing glass-filling lines, and has a lower carbon footprint, say the partners.

Developed and designed by Sipa’s Packaging Development Team and made from Indorama Venture’s original bottle resin and OxyClear barrier, the patented bottle is an improved alternative to traditional glass bottles. Helping the European wine industry address a glass shortage due to supply chain, energy and raw material challenges. The average cost of a glass wine bottle increased 23% from April 2020 to April 2023, and doubled in some European markets.

The new bottle was awarded top prize in the 2023 Best Packaging contest at Milan Design Week. It gives the same look, functionality and feeling of a traditional glass sparkling wine bottle.  A key Sipa innovation is the design of the bottle neck to make it look like the glass version, allowing it to accept the classical mushroom-shaped cork with metal cage closure. The base also matches the original glass version, while the bottle has a top-load resistance of 350kg.

Marco Brusadin, Global Packaging Development Director at Sipa, said, “With this proud innovation for the market, our intention is for consumers to enjoy the same celebratory sparkling wine experience - from uncorking to pouring. And second, to support the industry overall as wine companies can make the change at no cost, as extensive tests have proven that PET bottles can run on filling lines designed for glass bottles. The collaboration with Indorama Ventures offers environmentally improved packaging, while allowing brands to stand out by taking a stance on sustainability and differentiating themselves at point of sale, with creative shapes, easy-to-design bottles and improved logistics.”

At just 90 g, the new PET sparkling wine bottle is about 80% lighter than a traditional glass bottle and is almost unbreakable.  The optimal weight allows up to 33% more bottles per truck, and its shatter-proof properties help improve mobility logistics. These advantages offer wine brands opportunities in new channels like e-commerce and on-board transport as well as  new consumption occasions at festivals and events. Numerous tests of the barrier material conducted at the German Institute of Geisenheim showed that OxyClear PET Wine bottles offer the same benefits and functionality of glass after 24 months in storage at 15 degrees.  

The new PET bottle comes with sustainability credentials to match consumer demands. It is fully-recyclable in regular recycling streams, while PET on average emits less than half of the level of greenhouse gases (GHG) of glass bottles. This development is an important demonstration of how PET’s flexible, safe and lightweight properties are driving sustainable growth in packaging as the most recycled plastic in the world. 

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