Overview

Waste not want not: Circular Systems is turning agricultural surplus into high-value textiles.

Deep Dive

For Isaac Nichelson, CEO and co-founder of Circular Systems, haste doesn’t just make waste. It also results in a crucial missed opportunity.

Take, for instance, the millions of tons of inedible food-crop waste left behind after every harvest. These castoffs are often burned or abandoned to rot, sending prodigious amounts of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane gas into the atmosphere. At the same time, using fire to clear fields pollutes the air and contributes to life-threatening respiratory problems. “Burning rice straw causes huge human health crises every year in India,” Nichelson said.

Enter the Agraloop Bio-Refinery, a low-cost, entirely closed-loop system that transforms low-value agricultural biomass into high-value natural textiles. The proprietary process takes a biochemical approach, though one that stands apart from conventional viscose production, which Nichelson describes as very energy-, water- and chemical-intensive. “We don’t think the world needs more viscose,” he said. “The world needs more natural fiber.”

Circular Systems estimates that the five primary food-crop waste streams alone—banana trunks, pineapple leaves, sugarcane barks, oilseed hemp stalks and oilseed flax stalks—can provide a potential 250 million tons of textile fiber every year, or enough to meet 2.5 times the annual global demand.

“When you shift your perspective on these residues and you look at them as value, as resources, suddenly burning all of that and letting it rot is crazy,” he said. “It’s only because we're looking at these residues as waste that we’re treating them as such.”

With $350,000 in prize money from H&M Foundation’s 2018 Global Change Awards under its belt, Circular Systems is poised to bring its technology to scale. The company is piloting its process in a “couple of top secret facilities” in China and, pending a forthcoming round of Series A funding, is looking to expand into California. It has also lined up a series of commercial partners, including a world-renowned denim label and a buzzy French footwear company, to launch “some of the first Agraloop BioFibre products” in Spring 2020. Eventually, Circular Systems hopes to license mini-mills—all community owned—to the farming regions that need them most.

“The really important thing about Agraloop is it’s not just converting food waste into valuable products, but it’s doing so and providing only benefit to the community in that process,” Nichelson said. “We don't seek to do the old-school industrial model of going in to top-down-own every facility. We want to push a new economic paradigm.”

In what areas has the fashion industry made the biggest strides in sustainability in the last five years?

"In the past five years, the biggest progression for sustainability has been around the recognition of the critical importance of resource efficiency through recycling—what we now call “circularity.” Additionally, a big catalyst leading to the acceleration of real efforts in the space has been through the “Pulse of the Fashion Industry” reports from Boston Consulting Group, which highlight a bleak future for the fashion industry economically if we do not move quickly to resource efficiency. These reports, instigated by the Global Fashion Agenda, have ignited the beginnings of a true revolution in our industry, even though the revolution is gaining momentum far too slowly."

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