LOOPED IN with Carl Warkentin

Building circular ecosystems and urban mining for textiles with Cyndi Rhoades (Circle 8)

• Carl Warkentin • Season 1 • Episode 10

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What if our old clothes could become the foundation of an entirely new industry? Cindy Rhoades, a filmmaker who pivoted to become a textile entrepreneur, takes us on her remarkable journey from music videos to pioneering circular solutions for the fashion industry.

Rhoades' story begins with creative nightclub events that made social and environmental issues accessible and engaging. When one such event focused on ethical fashion, she discovered her passion for solving textile waste challenges, leading her to found Worn Again in 2005. The company's evolution from upcycling discarded airline seat covers into handbags to developing groundbreaking molecular recycling technology perfectly illustrates the learning curve of circular innovation.

But technology alone doesn't solve systemic problems. As Rhoades discovered, even the most promising recycling methods face a critical infrastructure gap. Her newest venture, Circle 8, addresses this challenge through automated sorting facilities designed specifically to prepare non-rewearable textiles for chemical and mechanical recycling. What makes her approach unique is the emphasis on ecosystem building – creating collaborative relationships between brands, recyclers, and existing sorters that connect waste streams with future manufacturing needs.

The most compelling insight Rhoades shares is reframing textile waste as an economic opportunity. For countries that don't produce traditional textile raw materials, circular systems enable "urban mining" – transforming domestic waste into valuable resources and establishing entirely new industries. With Circle 8's automated sorting line arriving in March and plans for a 25,000-ton facility underway, Rhoades is turning this vision into reality.

Whether you're fascinated by sustainability innovation, circular business models, or the future of fashion, this conversation offers a masterclass in how ecosystem thinking can transform waste challenges into economic opportunities. Listen now to discover how your discarded clothes might fuel tomorrow's textile revolution.

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Carl:

Hello everyone and welcome for another episode of Looped In. My name is Karl Barkington and I'm super excited to sit here today with no other than Cindy Rhodes, a filmmaker who somehow ended up as a crucial entrepreneur in the textile space in the UK the UK. This episode is especially important to me because I'm able to talk with another ecosystem builder about how to build infrastructure for a circular textiles industry. As you know, I have in building these kind of ecosystems in various roles, from a non-profit initiative to various industry activities board roles, and Cindy has her own unique story about how she tackles this ecosystem. So I hope you do enjoy this conversation as much as I did. So I hope you do enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Cindy, it's so nice to have you here today. Thank you so much for joining.

Cyndi:

In the beginning, I would love to ask you directly a question how does a filmmaker end up in the textiles industry? Hi, karl, and it's a pleasure to be here today. I don't know if I have one single answer for that. I think you know you spend your late teens, early 20s trying to figure out what you want to do, and my path to textile circularity was really a series of events.

Cyndi:

Style circularity was really a series of events, but maybe, to summarize it, I started working in filmmaking in my early 20s and was very keen to go into the creative industries and after a couple years of doing that working in music videos and more factual-based programming my personal interests started to change and shift and I got very interested in global economics and politics and trying to understand what made the world tick. And through that process of learning about economics, you start learning about social justice, social justice issues, climate change and that sort of thing, and I don't know. It was just a road towards. I started going to lectures and and talks here in London. I moved to London many years ago and it was just a kind of series of events where I realized I wanted to be doing something a bit more meaningful than making music videos.

Carl:

Interesting. I mean I never had that before, but I love that kind of career change. I never had that before, but I love that kind of career change. We recently met because of your current project, circulate, but before that you already started a textile recycling company, warnigan.

Cyndi:

Tell us more about that. Yeah, sure, so it was. If you go back to the early 2000s, when I was getting more engaged in together different types of, we'd have a panel of speakers, but also short films, musicians, bands and really the idea was in a nightclub to attract wider audiences to social and environmental issues. So it wasn't like going to a lecture, it was more like going out to the pub or out for an evening out with your friends and being stimulated by, you know, learning about these issues and sounds fun.

Cyndi:

It was fun, it was hard work, but it was a lot of fun and really that's what led me to textiles, because we did an event on fashion and ethical fashion was kind of the terminology at the time and it was a big event where we had Catherine Hamnet speaking. We had we featured a bunch of different types of ethical fashion brands at the time which were maybe just a handful of companies, and it was from that where I realized that I don't like the term fashion. I like the textile industry and the fact that it's a resource intensive industry and, you know, digging into that industry and learning about what some of the major problems are like textile waste, overconsumption and that sort of thing, that's really what attracted me into what became Worn Again, which was a company that started out in 2005 with an ambition to tackle a part of the textile waste problem and see if we could find, you know, create a business out of solving that problem. And so in their early years we started out with upcycling taking old textiles, turning them into second life products and eventually realizing that upcycling wasn't going to solve the problem, that we had to dive deeper into recycling more at the molecular level.

Cyndi:

But I think those first couple of years where we were trialing with upcycling, we really got to know what some of the challenges were with taking textiles and turning them into second life products, and really that's what led eventually to the idea of, okay, recycling is definitely the answer, but rather than taking an old textile and making it into something new, let's see if we can break it down into its raw material components, purify them, get them back into their original raw material form and then get those back into the supply chain as new.

Cyndi:

And it sounds like a simple story, but it really was about five to seven years of development on upcycling and working with companies, like we did a project with Virgin Atlantic where we took their old seat covers from the airlines and turned those into handbags and shoulder bags. Producing those in Portugal, I mean an absolute nightmare trying to take old textiles and turning them into nice products. I wouldn't recommend it. I think it's gone a lot in the last decade or so, but it was a real challenge but also a really good opportunity to learn about the nature of textiles and learn that maybe science could help play a part in solving this problem.

Carl:

You guys were very ahead of your time, I believe, because lately there are so many textile recycling startups out there, but you've been around for a while.

Cyndi:

One of the research institutes that we were involved with made an introduction to a Walker who soon thereafter became our chief scientific officer. We met with him and talked to him about the problem of textiles and the inability to recycle them, you know, through traditional means and, in a nutshell, we took his approach to dissolution chemistry and applied it to textiles, to polyester and cotton, the two most common fibers being used and we carried out a proof of concept back in I think it was 2011, 2012. And with that proof of concept, we you know, we thought we had discovered it all and we hopped on a plane and met with H&M in Stockholm and said you know, here we think we've got something that could be of use and we think it's got a future, and that they believed in it and they were our first major investor all that time ago. So it wasn't just us being at the forefront. I think having a brand like that so long ago, recognizing the future, was quite a big shift.

Carl:

Is H&M still involved in Born Again?

Cyndi:

No, yeah, they're still a shareholder. Yes, they were there from the early, very early days and then over the years, as people might know of that came in around 2018 or so, and slowly. That was part of our investment raising strategy was to bring in strategic partners who either needed the solution or could play a part in delivering the solution.

Carl:

It's so interesting that H&M is by now involved in so many different recycling technologies, but even more interesting for me who is. I mean, I'm someone who always says it's not only a technology issue that we're having here right now with the textile waste, because I believe technology is already out there and still will be advanced in the next years, but it's a lot of also an infrastructure issue, and I loved in our last conversation how we talked a bit about, you know, ecosystem building and infrastructure. So please share what Cir Circle 8 is all about.

Cyndi:

Yeah, actually, carl, that's such an important point, I think, in terms of the technology being there and being possible, but what else do you need to support that technology? But what else do you need to support that technology? And that's a good segue into from the technology that we were developing at WARN. Again, you know, it was one of those questions that kept coming up in the board meetings was you know where's the feedstock going to come from? And you know, I'd say, well, there's loads of it out there.

Cyndi:

Feedstock isn't the problem. We've got hundreds of thousands of tons of this stuff and it's everywhere, but the reality is that it's not. It's there but it's not being channeled the right directions. The whole economic, the economics behind what we call feedstock, the non-rewearable textiles incentivizes, isn't the right word.

Cyndi:

Feedstock is going different directions because the economics warrant that the current supply chain of post-consumer textiles for in most countries well, certainly in the UK, a lot of our, our end-of-use clothing are being collected, bailed up and exported to be sorted, you know, in lower cost labor regions, and so this was kind of a real awakening where we said, okay, right, if we're going to build regional chemical recycling plants, we need to start shifting the flows of materials, shifting the economics of non-rewearable textiles to incentivize them to not be exported or to incentivize them to not go to landfill.

Cyndi:

And really this was the inspiration behind Circle 8. And recognizing that automated sorting could play a really big part in this. And also, if we're going to sort our non-rewearable textiles automatically for the mechanical and chemical recyclers, we might as well take it through to the pre-processing steps, where we can separate by fiber composition, chop them up, remove all the buttons and the zips and all the other disruptors, and then get those garments into chopped up feedstock form according to the specification of each of the recyclers. And so that's a long-winded, I guess, way to say how Circle 8 came about was you know, we recognized there was a need for filling that gap, of turning end-of-use textiles into feedstock for recyclers in a way that's not currently being done and in a way that is low cost, high quality, and it encourages investment to go into these facilities. That will then enable further investment in large scale regional chemical recycling plants.

Carl:

And you totally hit a nerve here because it is in Germany one textile sorter and collector after the other goes bankrupt at the moment because their whole business model as you mentioned as well for the UK and and shipping most of it to the global south, to Africa, and sell it there as a second hand where eventually it would end up in landfill and the whole thing would be financed by maybe 10% that could be sold domestically for a really good price and that dynamic totally shifted right Because Africa gets brand new things from China cheaper than secondhand things from Europe, which means that the whole business case for the collectors and sorters falls apart up until the moment when the recycling part will be up and running, which eventually will be soon. So you really hit a nerve at the right time here. Where do you start with Circle 8? Where exactly do you start in the supply chain and where do you end?

Cyndi:

Yeah, good question. And I think you summed that whole current market status up quite well because in some ways it's counterintuitive. We're seeing so much, so many companies going out of business, which isn't the best sign for the investment community when we're trying to get them to invest. But equally, it is a sign of the times because it's showing that that previous model, built on reuse, for collecting and sorting is somewhat broken right now. So you know, when we were thinking about what kind of automated sorting facility do we want to set up, we thought about do we want to collect mixed textiles, re-wearable and non-re-wearable, what you know? How much of the process do we want to be involved in? And after a good two years of development and business modeling and working with the market, we realized that the best way for us to go about this is let's start from scratch. If we were to design everything in a vacuum and say, okay, start from scratch, how would we do this?

Cyndi:

We thought, hold on, here we're developing automated sorting because we want to see fiber to fiber recycling. So let's not touch the reuse market. Let the collector sorters who are sorting for reuse carry on and do what they do best. We need to find a way to get non-rewearable textiles to our door and into the facility with as little handling as possible. So that's where we start Non-rewareables get delivered to our facility our future facility and they will get debailed, automatically, sorted, and all the preprocessing steps that turns it into feedstock to then bail up again and send off to the different types of recyclers. Now that's our facility, which is, you know, that's the technical side and that's the bit you know you were saying earlier. The technology exists, it's the partnerships, it's the rethinking how post-consumer textiles are collected, how they're sorted, what the economics are and what kind of business model is needed to make this economical. And really that's where I think the technology is important, but the ecosystem and the business model around it is just as important if we want to make this work.

Carl:

You take non-rewearable textiles, does that mean only post-consumer textiles or also post-industrial waste, anything that is non-rewearable?

Cyndi:

Yeah, I think there's a distinction as well. Is it non-rewearable or non-resellable somewhere else, like dumped and not sold, or you know, if it can't be sold into markets here in the UK but it's still re-wearable? You know, we want to be able to find a solution that will deal with any textiles that can't find a second home. So it can be post-consumer, it can be, you know. So it can be post-consumer. It can be, you know, overstock, dead stock that doesn't have a market. It can be post-industrial, which we have less of that here in the UK, but there are plenty of manufacturing facilities as well that will have a bit of post-industrial. We're agnostic to the type of material. It could be hospitality, workwear, anything that is in a textile form that can't be reused or resold we classify as non-wearable textiles.

Carl:

All right, and once the EPR schemes are coming to life in Europe, I assume collectors will be paid to collect and then sorters will be paid to sort. So that will be you right. And how is your business case looking like until the EPR scheme comes to life?

Cyndi:

the EPR scheme comes to life. Yes, another big chicken and egg question and very much at the heart of how we've gone about this. So I think the key point here is that certainly in the UK We've not had an EPR announced or a date for EPR, and so much relies on that and the investment community is waiting to see this. So many people are waiting to see. So in the UK we haven't had a date for EPR and legislation to be implemented, but I think there's a very good sense that, definitely a good sense that it is coming. It's just a matter of when that will be and absolutely without a doubt, if we had a date that was announced, that would move people, it would move companies, it would move investors a lot quicker. So we really could use that. However, we also get a sense.

Cyndi:

In the UK there is a huge sense of momentum urgency.

Cyndi:

Some of the leading brand retailers are really, really keen to get solutions in place even though the EPR isn't here yet, and so we've been developing a business model that's based on that phased approach to EPR and that certainly in the early years pre-EPR, and that certainly in the early years pre-EPR, this sorting facility isn't going to be economically viable. So we need to find ways for it to work. So we've developed, without going into too much detail, a service model where those suppliers even though it's sort of indirect, it won't be the brand retailers just sending their in-store collections. It's more of a wider approach to how textiles are collected, but that they will be involved in that supply into automated sorting facilities and it's more of a service approach as opposed to just. You know, today they don't know what happens to their post-consumer textiles and they don't have anything to do with them. So I think, without sharing too much, it's a model that engages them in that and brings benefits to them by taking more of an ecosystem approach to their non-rewearable textiles but also to future recycled content.

Carl:

Can you? You said you don't want to go too much into detail, but I would love if you can share already a little bit of how you plan on doing that.

Cyndi:

Yeah, I guess the best way to describe it. So we've created a model where we're engaging the brands uh, engaging them in being more active in aggregating supply. That goes into automated sorting facilities and also linking those volumes and that engagement with access to future recycled content. So it's more of an ecosystem approach. It's connecting the dots in a way that it's less transactional and it's more about the relationships that are being built across the ecosystem, between brands, between recyclers, and also feeding back into their existing supply chains and potentially into new, more regional circular production hubs. Does that?

Carl:

help? Yeah, sure. So where do you get your feedstock from? Is it, then, those brands that you just mentioned you would collaborate with in this ecosystem approach, or is it the typical collecting company and municipalities?

Cyndi:

Yeah, so we're very open about where the supply comes from and who it comes from. It's definitely an open model and an invitation to all. All that we ask is that the materials that come to us have been pre-sorted and, because it's a service model, we have to charge a gate fee. So that's where some of the business modeling and the partnerships come into play, because we're not able to say buy, you know a thousand tons of non-rewearable textiles off of an existing collector sorter who maybe wants to sell them, whether they're selling into the open loop markets or you know a lot are sending to Pakistan because there's solutions in Pakistan at present. You know it will involve a lot of redirecting flows of where those non-rewarables are going to today, in the future.

Carl:

You get pre-sorted textiles Pre-sorted in what extent that it's basically pre-sorted into non-rewearables or in a different way as well and are you then the owner of those textiles, or is it basically a service that you provide to the collecting company or whoever delivers you those materials?

Cyndi:

yeah, that's a good question. The ownership topic comes up um every now and and I think it's a good one, and I would say you know well. Going back to your first question, around the pre-sort, when we say pre-sort we mean exactly that. So separating out the re-wearables from the non-re-wearables, so whoever's separating the re-wearables, who you know? They already have well-defined markets for that. That's great. We would then take the non-re-wearables build up into the ATSP and we also have a specification around that. So things like we would want the multi-layers separated out. We don't want any of the if it's contaminated with paint or chemicals or that sort of thing that needs sorting out beforehand. So it's a bit of a pre-sort to make sure that they're non-rewareable textiles that can go straight into automated sorting and we don't need to do another sort to take out any re-wearables or higher value materials. So that's the first step.

Cyndi:

Then what was the second question, second bit of the question? Oh, the ownership. Yeah, and when it comes to ownership, I think as an industry we're still working out what that means. Who should own them? Is it the customer who buys them? Is it the brand retailers? Is it the raw material producer? We don't really have an answer for that right now, because we're still working it out and I think this business model is going to continue to evolve over the next three to five, maybe 10 years, because it little bit crazy at the moment, because you know the markets are very limited, so we have to carry on supplying those markets that exist today.

Cyndi:

You know, whether it's the non-wovens, whether it's, I mean, there's there's so many different routes they're going today which many people would call or categorize as downcycling, um, but I think they're. They're good quality solutions like, um, insulation, furniture stuffing, uh, bedding, if possible, um, that sort of thing. You know those are perfectly good markets to sell into and we need to, we need to nurture those markets, find new markets for non-wovens but as well, because the chemical recyclers are only going to want, you know, your pure poly, your poly rich cotton and poly cotton. That represents a high percentage of the fiber basket. But we still have to find solutions for all of those other fibers and also fiber blends. So I guess that's why we took the service model, because it's a puzzle that we all have to work out, as opposed to just dumping your non-rewearable textiles onto one company and expecting them to sort it out. We need to come up with those kind of industry-wide solutions together. So ownership.

Carl:

I don't know yet. I think we need to all service that to a manual extent the typical collector and sorter already does. Who do you expect your competition to be?

Cyndi:

Yeah, another great question. I you know, in some ways it's similar to chemical recycling. We never saw other chemical recyclers as competitors because the problem is so huge and we need as many solutions commercialized and up and running as soon as possible. So in some ways we don't see other automated sorting facilities as competitors. We invite, because it's such a new market, we invite all the other collector sorters to be oops, I've lost my connection. Have I lost it? Oh good, it was spinning.

Cyndi:

So we invite anyone involved in collecting and sorting to be part of developing this first facility here in the UK because I think we could have, you know, collectively, a lot of learning and really join forces to make it a real success and to create some standardization around automated sorting.

Cyndi:

But saying that, that's the beautiful utopian picture, I think there will be others who think they want to go off and do their own facility and get it off the ground, which you know, to each his own.

Cyndi:

But I think we would be stronger collectively to focus on getting a first sorting facility that is an entirely new setup up and running together and then kind of scale out. The problem's big enough. We have enough non-rewearable textiles in the UK to supply something like 15 to 17 sorting facilities that are 50,000 tons capacity annually, like there's so much out there. So I just think the idea of it's too early to be competing. It's more important that we collaborate and pool our collective efforts to make a first facility a success, because there's so we need everyone's uh, um, we, we need the combined um expertise and experience of the collector sorters, who have been doing this for decades, together with the new thinking around circularity and all of the requirements of the brand retailers in this new world around transparency, traceability like we're so much stronger together. Transparency, traceability like we're so much stronger together, and and and we're a big believer in in, in seeing that happen.

Carl:

Whether it pans out like that or not, um, I don't know, but that's where we're at today you're clearly one of the front runners when it comes to implementing this ecosystem and, as I understand, your business model is still evolving. How are you financed right now? Do you take? Yeah private money? Do you have investors? Are you self-funded or do you have some public funding from the government?

Cyndi:

yes, yes, we uh in. When was it? March of this year? We, um, we were able to. We were involved in a, an innovate uk government funded consortium project here called act act uk and I think that stood for Automation, for Circularity in Textile. I can't remember the name, but it was ACT for short and as part of that project we had a budget Circle 8 had a budget to design do the conceptual design for a 25,000 ton per year sorting facility, which we achieved, and we've gone further in the design phases.

Cyndi:

Now we're working full steam ahead on that in more detailed design. But we also had a budget to purchase a large piece of equipment and we invested in new retexes, automated sorting line, after a lot of research. And we've been working with many of the sorting technology companies for years, like Valvin, we know PicVisa, tomra there's a good handful of really good technologies out there and we ended up going with NewRetex for certain reasons which I'm sure you're going to ask, but we landed on that one and we always knew that a single line sorter would make up either a small or a big part of the large-scale facility, and so we were lucky enough to be able to purchase that and it's arriving in March of next year. So we've got lots of planning to coordinate around that and make that a real success. I mean, I just there's so much opportunity in this space and I think the one thing maybe that I'll flip it on its head to kind of illustrate the opportunity.

Cyndi:

You know, in the UK right now we're producing virtually no raw materials no cotton, no, maybe a little bit of cellulosic pulp, no polyester to go into the global supply chain, because we're not raw material producers, we're not oil refineries, we're not big polyester production plants in the Far East, big polyester production plants in the far east. However, as we shift, as we get these automated sorting facilities up and running and a chemical recycling plant or two, suddenly we're going to turn into a new raw material industry here in the uk, like supplying the global supply chains of textiles. And that's just it. I mean it's a huge opportunity into the millions and chains of textiles and that's just. I mean it's a huge opportunity into the millions and millions of economic growth.

Cyndi:

It's a whole new sector that I don't think we spend enough time talking about the opportunity. We spend so much time talking about the problem and when's EPR coming? And what are we going to do with all this textile waste and it's all ending up being dumped in Africa. But it's like let's shift the focus. This is a really big opportunity for big industry in regional areas.

Carl:

You mentioned urban mining, which I love, because it now allows the countries like the UK or Germany to actually have their own, you know, resources natural resources, if you will by urban mining. So it's really cool. It's a big new economic opportunity. It gives us more supply chain resilience. I really love what you said there and I hope that the markets go more bit in that direction. With the whole recycling technologies that we have right now and and because we have in europe already, like these high collection rates, how do you, how is your take on the us? Because it's such a big market and only 15% of fashion or textile items are being collected, there must be a huge market and a huge white spot. Do you think there's a reason why nobody's tapping into that?

Cyndi:

Yeah, the US is unfathomable when you think about the volumes, the sheer volumes in the US. And without a doubt, of course they're sitting on their own oil and cotton fields. Well, they do have cotton fields, but you know circular recycled materials. They are sitting on them and literally burying them, burning them. When it comes to textile raw materials, so for sure, the opportunity is huge and you know, in the circles where we operate, you know it feels like there's a, you know, a deep understanding there, deep understanding there. Many of the innovations are coming from there, but equally, they haven't. There's still a long way to go with cracking the model in terms of, well, consumer behavior, collection, getting the volumes back into collection systems rather than through municipal waste that's a big one, but I guess the incentive to change that behavior isn't there yet until you've got the industrial solutions. Yes, the US is behind in many ways, but equally I don't think it would take very much, just like China, to get up to speed. So maybe they're taking a sit back and wait. Let other people do all the teething pains and show how it's done, and then you know, they can just replicate and scale up a lot quicker over there, but it's in some ways, I guess you know, because Europe has been focused on the post-consumer challenge for a while now and looking at new legislation and all of that, there's an opportunity to almost pilot these new systems in places. I mean, france is taking a leadership position for sure.

Cyndi:

I think the UK has a real opportunity, even though we don't have the EPR date announced yet. But you know we could trial these you know flows of materials in a way that really helps the wider global. You know the industry kind of take it forward. I would love to see the US pick up and drive some innovation, but I'm not sure it's got the right leadership at the moment to drive that side of things. It'd be great. Well, I'm talking about national leadership, but, as you know, there's so much happening at state level because there are a lot of people and companies who recognize that there is an opportunity here, places like California and New York. So, yeah, I think it's a huge opportunity for everyone. It will depend on where the appetite is, where the investment community is strong and can see the opportunity and invest wisely and works with the right partners and all that sort of stuff.

Carl:

Right, yeah, I mean, I'm very curious as well and in the end, regulation can help so much and is important and crucial, but should not also be the only reason for a business model or the only foundation for a business model. It very interesting, also financially, to collect more, build that infrastructure and then go into the whole sorting recycling game as well, but I guess that is something we will have to see. Cindy, thank you so much for taking the time today. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you, especially because you have this ecosystem approach, which I really love, and wish you all the best for Circle 8 and can't wait to exchange with you soon again.

Cyndi:

Thanks, carl, and it's been a real pleasure speaking with you today and equally in awe of your belief in ecosystems and needing that approach to really drive circular textiles. So thanks very much.

Carl:

Thank you so much, Cindy.