Less than 1% of textiles are recycled into new clothing, with most ending up in landfills or incinerated. The fashion industry generates 92 million tons of waste annually, driven by fast fashion and mixed-material fabrics that are hard to recycle. Mechanical and chemical recycling face challenges like fiber degradation and high costs.
Elastane poses a major challenge for garment recyclability. “Most fiber-to-fiber recycling technologies have strict input requirements for fiber composition and purity—for example, elastane is problematic for several of these technologies,” according to McKinsey.
Polyester recycling methods like thermo-mechanical recycling often require elastane-free inputs to function properly. Chemical recycling faces similar constraints, as all current technologies are highly sensitive to elastane, creating both technical and economic barriers.
Ravel is a textile-to-textile recycling company, currently specializing in polyester and poly-elastane waste to introduce textile-derived PET into the fashion industry. Their innovative closed-loop system efficiently removes dyes and contaminants at a competitive cost.
Ravel is not an energy-intensive or destructive depolymerization technology, often referred to as ‘chemical recycling’, a bio-enzymatic approach, or a mechanical downcycling process.
Rather, they use a closed loop process to successfully remove dyes and other contaminants, especially elastane (a.k.a. Lycra). The process maintains the integrity of the underlying base materials and purifies them from the ‘gunk’ that causes them to be non-recoverable in other processes.
They call it purification recycling. Because the solution does not depolymerize the fibers, it reduces energy intensity and shortens process time, thereby increasing throughput.
As of January 2025, PET prices range from $1.36/kg in Europe to $1.35/kg in North America, while RPET in Europe is at $1.97/kg and around $1.67/kg in the US. Ravel’s recycled PET (RPET) price depends on the source and scale, but the range suggests it will compete with virgin PET prices, which fluctuate by region. As such, Ravel’s unit economics and techno-economic analysis (TEA) are cost-competitive with virgin PET.
Currently, Ravel receives feedstock for free from corporations looking to address elastane waste, and future feedstock costs are low enough to remain viable for strong financials.
Their purification-based process is capital-efficient, with key COGS estimates secured. Ravel's long-term success depends on scaling their technology, optimizing feedstock costs, and transitioning from a batch to a continuous process for higher efficiency.
The fashion industry generates 97 million tons of textile waste annually, with 85% ending up in landfills. Textile lifespan from synthesis to end of life contributes to 10% of the global greenhouse gas footprint.
Recycling polyester has a particularly strong environmental impact. Virgin polyester production accounts for 40% of global textile fiber production, consuming 70 million barrels of oil annually. Using recycled polyester (rPET) cuts energy consumption by 59%, reduces CO₂ emissions by 32%, and saves up to 90% of the water compared to virgin polyester.
However, only 14% of polyester is currently recycled, mostly from plastic bottles rather than textiles, due to technological challenges. The bottle industry is suffering from the use of bottle PET into polyester, the demand and the cost is increasing uncontrollably. This leads brands to choosing cheaper virgin polyester rather than expensive RPET.
There is a need for closed loop recycling to keep recycled PET close to PET pricing. Ravel is not only bringing textile to textile RPET recycling but is also offering it to price parity with virgin PET. Ravel is finally solving this complex challenge.
Ravel is targeting a $61B polyester market and expanding into a $13B elastane market. While fashion innovation focuses on mono-materials and circularity, recycling remains key, especially for blends. Ravel’s primary focus is the post-industrial pure polyester ($5.1B) and post-industrial poly-elastane ($4.5B) markets, totaling $9.1B.
The pure polyester market is based on 3.9M tonnes of waste, with polyester priced at $1,314/tonne. For poly-elastane, two sizing approaches estimate 2.9M–3.9M tonnes of waste. Additionally, the recycled polyester market is currently 8.6M tonnes, worth $11.3B, demonstrating strong industry demand for sustainable polyester solutions.
Ravel currently makes drop-in ready textile-derived rPET (recycled polyester) to be transformed back into fiber, yarn, fabric, and eventually clothing. While polyester is the focus for now, the technology is applicable for many blended textile materials. They are unlocking the circular economy for apparel, in particular with blended fiber textiles.
Founder and CEO Zahlen Titcomb assembled a team of experts in 2019 to develop a scalable solution for sustainable polyester. His vision was clear: create a process that could compete with virgin PET on price.
Zahlen Titcomb, CEO
Zahlen brings a balance of business and technical experience from starting, running, and exiting several businesses, including establishing and managing a full global apparel materials and supply chain. He is equally comfortable in big-picture strategic leadership as he is with the detailed minutia that make winning organizations succeed. He is tireless in his pursuit of leading Ravel to help solve the massive textile waste challenge.
John Goods, Ph.D - CTO
John holds a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from MIT and has over a decade of experience in leading high-performance teams and developing products in multiple industries, such as gas sensing, at-home diagnostics, functional plastics, and textile recycling. He holds 4 granted patents.
Kristen Albrecht, MBA - CSO & VP Operations
Kristen brings nearly a decade of experience in sustainable fashion, supply chain operations, and circular economy innovation. With an MBA in Sustainable Solutions from Presidio Graduate School, she leads sustainability and operations at Ravel, ensuring operational excellence and measurable impact. Kristen’s background includes managing complex supply chains, driving go-to-market strategies, and conducting lifecycle assessments to quantify environmental impact.
Over five years of research, collaboration, and innovation, the team achieved this ambitious goal. Now, they are bringing their breakthrough technology to the world’s most powerful and influential brands, driving real impact in the industry.
“The hallmark of a lasting technoeconomic advantage is if a technology creates a win on physics fundamentals, which means they use less matter, energy, space or time to produce a product,” remarked Helen Lin, Partner at At One Ventures.
“Of all the numerous and various textile recycling companies trying to solve the textile waste problem that I’ve seen, Ravel is unique in the market in that it has the clear technoeconomic win on all fronts. Their process has the fastest throughput, lowest energy consumption, and is the most resource-efficient while being truly closed loop and producing high purity PET.”
