The polyester waste opportunity.
Close to a 100 million tonnes of polyester/PET is manufactured annually:
• A small fraction of mainly pure bottle material is currently recycled
• 50-60% of the polyester is used for fibres - less than 1% is recycled
• Vast majority of the material goes to landfills or incineration
Polyester rich waste is an attractive and essentially unexploited raw material source
Global Polyester Fibre Market
Connecting existing value chains
Due to its attractive characteristics a polyester recycling industry processing close to 10 million tonnes already exists. This includes installed industrial capacity to process Rewin BHET into new polyester products
Making what’s difficult possible.
The largest polyester rich waste pools are technically difficult to recycle with acceptable unit economics leading polyester recyclers to focus on tapping into niche waste pools and subsidies. Unfortunately neither strategy scales as heavy industry expansion requires raw materials and operational cash flows.
At Rewin we have taken a different path and built a tech stack for scalable megascale polyester recycling.
