Textile innovations company Evrnu has launched a high-performance, recyclable lyocell material–100% NuCycl r-lyocell–made entirely from cotton textile waste.
Using cotton textile waste as its sole raw material, the fiber is designed to replace and outperform virgin cellulosic and plastic-based materials, and offer significant impact reductions, while maintaining recyclability. Evrnu has launched the fiber with a premium t-Shirt made of 100 percent NuCycl r-lyocell by designer Carlos Campos.
Evrnu noted that since 2014, it has been forging a pathway for the tens of millions of tons of textile waste that end up in landfills or incinerators every year to flow back into the value chain. Evrnu’s suite of chemical recycling solutions use textile waste as a resource, breaking it down and regenerating it into new materials.
Marking the company’s first commercially available fiber, Evrnu said 100 percent NuCycl r-lyocell can replace 90 percent of current textile fibers, including cotton, man-made cellulosic fibers, nylon and polyester. Knowing performance and quality are key to adoption, Evrnu’s 100 percenrt NuCycl lyocell meets or exceeds the performance attributes of high tenacity nylon and polyester in terms of tenacity, strength and comfort, while remaining recyclable up to 10 times, the company claimed.
“We have at least a 20-year push to innovate around climate change to make up for the past 100 years of collateral industrial damage,” Stacy Flynn, co-founder and CEO of Evrnu, said. “Our team and partners are dedicated and aligned to outperforming and scaling textile recycling solutions to bring our industry into balance with natural systems.”
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Evrnu has raised $31 million in funding and is building a new facility in the Southeast to demonstrate its fiber regeneration technologies at commercial scale. This new facility will service 17,000 metric tons of pulp and 2,000 tons of fiber per year.
“Since we founded Evrnu, we have proven our technologies not only work but are scalable using existing infrastructure,” Christopher Stanev, chief technology officer of Evrnu said. “Imagine what our industry will look like when we are done.”
The Carlos Campos T-Shirt made of Evrnu’s new fiber is now available on CarlosCampos.com for $110. Evrnu said it will continue commercializing 100 percent NuCycl r-lyocell with a range of brand partners in the coming months, as it works toward developing a larger, closed-loop circular ecosystem for the textiles industry.
With Evrnu’s NuCycl technologies, discarded clothing is broken down and transformed into a pristine new fiber engineered to provide strong performance characteristics for creating new premium textile products.