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SPEAKER_03: I was on board a cruiser on its way into the Arabian Gulf, quite a time to be in the service. We immediately suspected it was Osama bin Laden and we were, instead of continuing on into the Arabian Gulf, we stayed right where we were off the coast of Pakistan and participated in the response. So I had really front row seats to the conflict. Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_06: And then, of course, it would go on into Iraq and after Afghanistan, Iraq. And so tell me a little bit about some of the things that you did. You were also deployed for the Iraq War also on ship or on land?
SPEAKER_03: On land, actually. And the first person I met when I entered Iraq was, at that time, General Petraeus. And he said, what is a sailor doing in the middle of the desert? And as the Iraq War was getting underway, they really needed support in terms of analysis on the private sector that existed and how that could be utilized in the posts of the Amr-Iraq to help reconstruct the country. And so I was writing a lot of white papers in the Pentagon and then I was tapped to actually go over to Iraq and support various missions. So when did you wrap up your naval career?
SPEAKER_03: I wrapped up active duty in 2004.
SPEAKER_06: So 2004, and I guess you went on tour from whatever defense industry management firm, but was it like an investment firm?
SPEAKER_03: Yes. It was a small group investing in mainly new NATO countries that were soon to join the EU. So these would be countries like Romania or Bulgaria, where it was still very emerging markets with a lot of opportunity. And I was excited to go there. My Pentagon boss was a civilian, had a lot of experience in those markets. And so we went there to invest US dollars into these emerging opportunities. And for me, I already got a bug for business and how enterprise can move economies and move countries. And I was very interested in that. And so for me, Eastern Europe was a great place to cut my teeth and really take on a lot of tasks. All right.
SPEAKER_06: So you decide in 2009 to go back to school, get an MBA. And tell me what your thinking was that you would get an MBA and maybe start a business.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. What we were doing already in Eastern Europe was pretty entrepreneurial, but I felt that I could use more sophisticated tools and just be better. And I wanted to expand my network. And so it felt like a logical next step for me.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. So you start that program. You get your MBA. And I guess sometime after that, you would meet this guy, Hilary Kaprowski, who was a very famous immunologist. He was involved in the polio vaccine. And I guess he was running a biotech foundation or he was running a company, a lab. And he talked to you about an idea he had. Can you tell me about that meeting and what came out of that?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So he actually is an old family friend. My father went to medical school with Hilary in Warsaw until the war broke out and my father had to escape and they reconnected after the war. This is World War II you're talking about. World War II. Yeah. And so I was just visiting him, having dinner at his house, and he was talking to me about his foundation and the research they were doing in plant sciences specifically. His vision was to use plants as a vehicle for vaccines, to develop vaccines, grow vaccines. And he was really frustrated with the uptake from the FDA and other sources. So he started applying that know-how to look at industrial applications. And over dinner, he told me that he just had a patent granted and a lot of press around an engineered, non-smoking tobacco plant that could be used for biofuels.
SPEAKER_06: Wow. Okay. So you had this idea to use tobacco plants to make biofuel and even got a patent for that technology. And presumably, that idea really grabbed your attention because of your time you spent working on fuel tankers in the Navy. Is that right?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. One of my first jobs in the Navy, I was boarding ships smuggling oil out of Iraq against UN sanctions. And we'd usually have to sit on those ships after we intercepted them for 18 hours at a time. And I spent a lot of time to think about the geopolitical nature of energy and oil, and that really ignited a passion inside of me to look at alternative fuels and how amazing it would be if you could democratize energy, take these large poker chips away from bad actors around the world. I mean, we're still seeing this today in Europe with the war in Ukraine. And so when he mentioned that to me, and it happened to be during this global recession where I was not active anymore, I thought this is something I could really dig my teeth into. And so the next thing we know, we're starting what's now CERC, but at that time was called Titan Biosciences.
SPEAKER_06: And this was to turn tobacco into a fuel source like biofuels for airplanes? Exactly.
SPEAKER_03: Or maybe more like cars and trucks. We were specifically targeting ethanol and biodiesel and doing it with a crop that is not a food crop and can grow almost anywhere in the world.
SPEAKER_06: And right, because obviously biofuels are made generally from corn, right? Right. And so yeah, tobacco, I mean, it's odd. What is it about tobacco that makes it a good source for this fuel?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, this is not a typical tobacco plant. They grow really large. We treated them differently. We grew more per acre. And what was good about it is that tobacco grows in over 100 countries around the world and we could get good yields per acre. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, and let's just talk about the process for a moment. I mean, it was a hydrothermal process. Can you kind of explain how that worked? Like you chop up, you would basically process dried leaves or I don't know, you took the tobacco plant and did you dry it like they do for cigars or? Yeah, no, nothing like that.
SPEAKER_03: We would harvest it fresh. We were using combines to do it, chop it up. The juices when you harvest it were, we would press out because those already had high amounts of sugar that we could extract for fermenting into ethanol. And the remaining biomass we put through this hydrothermal process where we could use water to act like molecular scissors basically to cut down the cellulose into glucose and extract the oil.
SPEAKER_06: So you're basically mechanically doing what nature naturally does. Like the oil we use today are plants, were plants millions of years ago, right? Animals and plants. And so you're essentially doing that but in a much more expedited way, applying pressure to create a fuel. Exactly.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, where it's like time machine for nature.
SPEAKER_06: So a cool idea and you'd been in the Navy so you knew that there was a lot of interest in biofuels. But what was the challenge you had? I've read that you had a hard time raising money but why? Because you started this in 2012 but why couldn't you attract any investors?
SPEAKER_03: What I can now see in retrospect is there are so many compounding risk factors. You had to find farmers willing to grow it. You had to deal with a plant that didn't have any other application and also the timing was pretty bad. There was a lot of big failures in biofuels in general and so a lot of the investment community, the venture funds said, look, our hands are tied even if we wanted to. We're not permitted to invest anymore in biofuels. And so it was a scary time. We could see, as I say, the end of the earth, our runway getting smaller and smaller and we had to quickly scramble to find new applications.
SPEAKER_06: But you had this process that you were working on. And so by the way, how are you financing the process with no investment capital?
SPEAKER_03: We were creative. Joke, we make one plus one equal five all the time. But we did have some investment from individuals, high net worth individuals. And we had millions of dollars of grants from the Virginia Tobacco Commission, for example. So that allowed us to develop this technology which is now the bedrock of CERC.
SPEAKER_06: From what I understand, you were essentially turning the pulp from tobacco stocks to paper. Yeah, that was one of the iterations.
SPEAKER_03: Great research there. Yeah, we were looking at just continuing with tobacco. And so we looked at how to apply that hydrothermal know-how to make non-tree pulp for packaging, paper, you name it. And it turns out the highest or one of the highest qualities of pulp or cellulose goes into clothing, about 300 million trees a year. And that's when a Swedish trading company, they traded primarily in paper and pulp, but they also had a recycling business. And they were the ones that suggested we try running some old t-shirts through our process to see if we could recover anything. And it worked.
SPEAKER_06: We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Peter changes course, transforming his biofuel company into one that recycles textiles. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.
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SPEAKER_06: Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz and my guest today is Peter Majeronofsky, who back in 2016 discovered a way to break down and reuse cotton and polyester. So okay, so you start experimenting with this and you see that it's successful. You can actually take a shirt and you can actually shred it up and what? I mean, they didn't just want like a bag stuffed with like shredded cotton. What did you give them? What did you deliver to them?
SPEAKER_03: We gave them a high purity cellulose or a high purity pulp that could go at the very beginning of the supply chain to make fibers like viscose, rayon, or lyocell. So we had two streams coming out of our process. We had the high purity cellulose or pulp, but we also had the building blocks of polyester which traditionally come from oil and gas industry.
SPEAKER_06: All right, so once this happened, I mean, was it clear at that point that you were going to pivot away from biofuels and tobacco?
SPEAKER_03: Not quite. We were trying a bunch of things. We were throwing basically spaghetti against the wall to see what would stick so we could continue on as a company. When we figured out the textile recycling, we didn't honestly think it was solving a big problem. We didn't know at the time. Then we started immediately researching things to Google and other resources and saw that it was a really big problem.
SPEAKER_06: This is a huge problem because obviously the fashion industry accounts for a significant percentage of carbon emissions and pollution in rivers and oceans. I think up to 20% of the world's wastewater comes from the fashion industry. And then just a small percentage of clothing is recycled. So you were being contacted by manufacturers who were like, how do we use more recycled materials in our clothing?
SPEAKER_03: By manufacturers but also brands. One of our first cold calls was from Patagonia. And they have a take-back program where you can come in with a Patagonia garment that's used. It doesn't matter how old. It will give you some value for it. And then they try to resell it. Or they'll even try to repair it to resell it. But if they can't repair it and resell it, they've been warehousing it. So they had this big problem of warehouses full of end-of-use clothing that needed to be recycled. And so that was what drove that phone call.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. So, OK, so you were contacted by Patagonia first and then eventually others. And they wanted to know, can you do this at scale? So I have to imagine to do it at scale, you had to raise, really raise serious money to make that happen. Serious, serious money. Yeah, a lot of people wanted to know when they could start sending truckloads over,
SPEAKER_03: when they could start buying recycled material. And we're still on that path. Yeah, it is very capital intensive. We're talking about significant chemical engineering processes.
SPEAKER_06: So let's talk about how this works. Just a small percentage of clothing is recycled. Less than 1%. Less than 1% globally. The idea is let's figure out how we can get more stuff to you guys so you can recycle it, or help us recycle it. Let's talk about your process first. I think most of the t-shirts come in, or the articles of clothing that come in are poly cotton, so they're like a combination of cotton and polyester, right? That's right. OK, and then you essentially are doing what with that article of clothing?
SPEAKER_03: So we shred it, put it through our process. That strips out the dyes and other finishing chemistry. And what we're left with is a very high purity cotton cellulose and those polyester building blocks that can be used for making new clothing.
SPEAKER_06: So you can take a t-shirt, a poly cotton shirt, put it through your process, this hydrothermal reaction, basically pressure, water, heat. But then how do you separate the cotton from the polyester in that shirt there? It's all intertwined.
SPEAKER_03: That's right. That's the beauty of it. When you reverse the reaction of making polyester, you're breaking it down to its original building blocks, and those building blocks dissolve into water. So essentially, you're dissolving away the polyester and also separating it away from the cotton. So you have a solid stream with the cotton and a liquid stream with the polyester building blocks. Wow.
SPEAKER_06: All right. So you basically can take a poly cotton t-shirt and essentially melt away the plastic, the polyester. You're left with white cotton because you've removed the dyes, and it gets shredded up, and then that can essentially be turned into thread to make new t-shirts. Exactly. How many cycles can a piece of clothing go through before you can't recycle it any longer?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So whenever you have a chemical engineering process, you always have a little bit of loss from just material handling and things like that. But the polyester can get repolymerized and unpolymerized back and forth, essentially infinitely. I remember when my children were babies, we decided to use cotton diapers for them because
SPEAKER_06: I just hate the idea of throwing away diapers and just seeing piles of just diapers in a landfill. So we got a service. They'd pick up cotton diapers every week and then bring back fresh cotton diapers. It was great.
SPEAKER_06: But still, it's water-intensive. It requires a lot of bleach, and the service was doing that. I have to imagine this process still requires a lot of water.
SPEAKER_03: It does, but we recycle over 90% of it back into the beginning of the process. How do you do that?
SPEAKER_03: A lot of chemical engineering, a lot of water treatment. We're doing filtration steps to remove the dyes and other finishing chemistries so that we can then use that water again.
SPEAKER_06: Huh. All right, so essentially, I think I'm right in saying this. There is more than enough clothing in the world to continue to recycle and to continue to make new clothing. Is that right? The premise is today there are enough pieces of clothing that are not recycled that if they were recycled, we could just use that. We wouldn't have to get virgin cotton or virgin plastic.
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely. We believe we have all the clothes we need to make all the clothes we'll ever need. When you look at the scale of this industry, it's massive. A lot of it ends up in landfill within a year or two. There's a lot of material there that is in a linear system that really should be recirculated so we can continue to use those resources.
SPEAKER_06: We're going to take another quick break, but when we come back, how Peter turned polycotton recycling into a growing business and his thoughts on fashion's looming reckoning with sustainability. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.
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SPEAKER_06: Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest today is Peter Majerinoski, co-founder and CEO of Cirque. OK, so now you've got the technology down and you've got brands, I believe Zara, for example, is already working with you and already has a few articles of clothing that have been made from recycled material. Tell me a little bit about how you source all of the clothing because, as you say, only 1% of clothing in the world is recycled. So is it – when you go into a Zara or an H&M, I think a lot of them have like bins where you can just drop things off. But that's still just a fraction of it. Where are you getting the stuff from?
SPEAKER_03: Accommodation of sources and unfortunately for the planet, but fortunately for business, there's no lack of input material. We get a lot of material from cut and sew factories. To make a shirt, it takes about another shirt worth of waste along that whole supply chain to produce it. And most of it is that final step when you're cutting patterns. And just discarding, just discarding the textiles from what you're not using in a t-shirt.
SPEAKER_03: Exactly. About 15% hits the factory floor. And so that's a very good source for waste as other solutions are scaling in terms of how do we collect from households, sort and get those to providers or recyclers like us. There's also a whole another class. There's uniform companies, for example, that process a lot of uniforms. They're essentially big laundries that are constantly washing things. And there's a significant amount that can't be put back into use. And they're landfilling that right now. Also hospitals use a lot of textiles. Law enforcement uses a lot of textiles. Universities do. So those are all great sources of post-consumer waste that doesn't necessarily have to come from a household.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, it seems like that's, but that seems like another business entirely. We had TerraCycle on the show a couple weeks ago and they obviously have a really robust network of collecting waste. But you guys are processing it. You can't also, at least for now, also collect it. So how do you get people to send you stuff? How do you get these factories to send you stuff? How do you build partnerships? How are you doing it? Yeah, we are attacking that problem from a couple angles.
SPEAKER_03: We are working with people that are just focused on the collection and aggregation of waste. We're working directly with factories that have waste. When we work with brands, you mentioned Zara, for example, we also ask them about their waste and about their factories and to direct us to those factories or to direct those factories to give us their waste. So that's been somewhat effective right now, but I think there's still opportunity here. The circular ecosystem has opportunities all over the place.
SPEAKER_06: So tell me a little bit about how you were able to sort of scale it up. And presumably, I know you raised some money over time from different venture funds, including Bill Gates' venture fund. I think you've raised now something like over $40 million, is that about right?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So last year alone, we've raised about $50 million.
SPEAKER_06: Wow. Okay. And tell me about the facility that you built. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: So we are at a commercial pilot scale at about five tons per day in Springfield, Ohio, and in Danville, Virginia. And we are doing that with engineering partners that provide equipment and other solutions to various industries. And that's how we've been able to build and scale our solution very quickly. But the bulk of the funds we've recently raised are going towards the engineering and planning for our first really large-scale integrated facility, and that would process about 65,000 tons per year.
SPEAKER_06: So how much capacity do you expect to have to be able to, like, I don't know, I don't know if you can quantify it in a way that's easy to understand. Instead of, like, tons or, like, I don't know, like, a million t-shirts a month or I don't know. Yeah. Where are you now?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So we are, you could say, roughly 15,000, 20,000 garments a day at our current scale. So something more about 250,000 garments a day.
SPEAKER_06: And how long does it take to process one? Just seconds?
SPEAKER_03: Yes. It happens very, very quickly. And it's a continuous process, too, so we're now doing it in a continuous way. But from end to end, it's about 15 minutes. Wow.
SPEAKER_06: So you guys teamed up with Zara earlier this year, and you've released, have you released this line yet?
SPEAKER_03: We did. It was a four-piece collection we released back in May during Design Week in Milan. It was the world's first collection made from poly-cotton waste.
SPEAKER_06: Entirely from poly-cotton waste. And your label is sewn in alongside the Zara label. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: I should also say they're investors. We were their first technology investment, and they've been fantastic partners to work with. And it's not common for a brand to share that key real estate on a garment with another company. And so we were very proud that they agreed to put our name there.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. So give me a sense of where you guys are headed. I mean, right now you've got a partnership with Zara, and they're an investor as well. And do you have other partnerships in the works? And what are you hoping to accomplish through those partnerships?
SPEAKER_03: We have partnerships with various brands. Some of them, of course, are investors like Patagonia and Zara. Avi Dennison is another one, Zalando in Europe. And we have a calendar set out for several more product releases. And those product releases are really important because they help us educate consumers. As you mentioned, we're buying this stuff, and we're feeding this industry. And I think it's for so many reasons. I mean, clothing is such a personal thing. I like to say it's the only artistic thing most people do every day. And when it doesn't match your values, that's a challenge. And so that reckoning is starting to happen now in the industry for clothing. Hmm.
SPEAKER_06: Do you, I mean, as I mentioned earlier, the fashion industry is a huge—and I don't mean to single them out, because all of us are responsible. We buy the clothing and we wear it. And the fashion industry is serving human consumers who are buying their products, especially fast fashion brands, are some of the worst offenders. And again, not them, us as consumers, because we support those practices. But I mean, if in fact the companies are using 100 percent recycled material to produce articles of clothing, I have to assume there's still problems, though, right? I mean, because they're still dyeing the clothing. They're still producing wastewater, for example. I mean, they may not be using virgin plastic or cotton, but there are still challenges that they will have to resolve. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03: I think most people don't know who makes their clothing, how it's made, where it comes from, including fashion executives. And so that's a big, big, big challenge. And so we're starting with non-virgin materials is just the beginning. You also have to think about labor, water usage, dye, your total life cycle assessment, which is a term of art for how much greenhouse gas emissions you're producing. And so it's a really 360 problem that has to be solved.
SPEAKER_06: So give me a sense of where you think this is headed. I mean, obviously, I can't speak for Patagonia or Zara or some of your other investors, but I'm assuming they want a significant percentage, if not all of their clothing to be recycled. I mean, at the current rate of growth and pace, how much of their inventory do you think could be recycled material in like five or 10 years from now?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well, in the text, the parent of Zara just put out their targets where they want to have 40% of their clothing made from recycled sources, an additional 25% from next generation materials, which we would fall in both categories. And you also have regulation coming. Now you have this huge industry that's super optimized that has to fix itself and has largely been unregulated. And I look at the paper recycling industry as a great example. From 1990 to 2000, that industry added 60 million tons a year of annual capacity. The following decade, another 70 million tons of annual capacity for a total of 130 million tons. And that's right on the same order of magnitude as what we're doing today with textiles. And so I think this very old and optimized industry can be transformed in 20 years. And there's a lot of capital out there and a lot of traditional ways of doing things that we need to disrupt. Pete, thank you so much.
SPEAKER_06: Thank you. That's Peter Majeronowski, co-founder and CEO of Cirque. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And it's totally free. This episode was produced by Carla Estevez and edited by John Isabella with research help from Jacey Howard. Our music was composed by Ramtin Ereblui. Our audio engineer was James Willets. The production team includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Chris Mussini, Elaine Coates, Romel Wood, Sam Paulson, and Kerry Thompson. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. Hey, Prime members. You can listen to How I Built This early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus and Apple Podcasts. If you want to show your support for our show, be sure to get your How I Built This merch and gear at WonderyShop.com. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. Hey, it's Guy here. And while we're on a little break, I want to tell you about a recent episode of How I Built This Lab that we released. It's about the company TerraCycle and how they're working to make recycling and waste reduction more accessible. The founder, Tom Zaki, originally launched TerraCycle as a worm poop fertilizer company. He did this from his college dorm room. Basically, the worms would eat trash and then they would turn it into plant fertilizer. Now, his company has since pivoted from that, and they recycle everything from shampoo bottles and makeup containers to snack wrappers and even cigarette butts. And in the episode, you'll hear Tom talk about his new initiative to develop packaging that is actually reusable in hopes of phasing out single-use products entirely and making recycling and TerraCycle obsolete. You can hear this episode by following How I Built This and scrolling back a little bit to the episode, Making Garbage Useful with Tom Zaki of TerraCycle, or by searching TerraCycle, that's T-E-R-R-A-C-Y-C-L-E, wherever you listen to podcasts.
