Cyclone Technology – the quiet giant rewriting the story of textile waste

Recycling is a familiar word, but its meaning in the textile industry is more complicated than most people realize. Turning waste into new fiber is not one simple process and not all recycling is the same.

Cyclone, a fast growing recycled yarn producer working with more than 200 brands worldwide, is one of the companies bringing clarity and industrial scale to this space. The company operates across more than 20 countries and is building a system designed to keep polyester in use for far longer than a single product cycle. It aims to recycle 520,000 tons of textiles a year by 2030 and is already expanding rapidly toward this target.

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Bottle-to-Textile: A Mechanical Process That Has Become Standard

The route most people know is bottle-to-textile recycling. It works like this: plastic bottles are collected, cleaned and sorted. They are chopped into flakes, melted into pellets, transformed into PET chips and spun into yarn. It is an efficient way to reuse single-use plastic and it has shaped the recycled polyester market for more than a decade. Cyclone currently produces about 400,000 tons of this material every year and has plans to increase that capacity.

Mechanical recycling is helpful, but it is also limited – bottles were never designed to become clothing in the first place and the loop does not continue beyond that first transformation.

Which is why the next step matters much more for long-term circularity.

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RESURGE®: Chemical Textile-to-Textile Recycling at Scale

Cyclone’s RESURGE® technology addresses the main challenge in the textile industry’s waste problem. End-of-life garments are difficult to recycle because they are mixed, contaminated or made of blended fibers – and RESURGE® is Cyclone’s answer. It is a chemical process that breaks polyester down to its basic molecules and rebuilds it with virgin-grade quality.

Chemical recycling needs much cleaner and more precisely prepared textile input than mechanical recycling. The material must be carefully sorted, cleaned and processed so the system can work properly and deliver good results.

The feedstock is a mix of 70% pre-consumer waste, such as cutting scraps generated during production and 30% post-consumer garments, such as uniforms and donated clothing, collected in China. For every 1.3 tons of textile waste, the system produces one ton of usable recycled yarn, which represents a strong conversion rate for chemical recycling.

The steps are structured. Textiles are collected and automatically sorted by fiber type, including polyester, cotton, polyamide (nylon) and blends. Metal parts like zippers and buttons are removed. The polyester portion then goes through continuous depolymerization and repolymerization and the result becomes new PET chips ready for spinning.

A key advantage of Cyclone’s setup is that most of the preparation work is done in-house instead of by outside partners. This allows the company to control how clean and consistent the material is before recycling starts, which leads to more reliable processes and better-quality yarn.

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Performance and Color Without the Traditional Drawbacks

Recycled yarns have sometimes been associated with compromise, but Cyclone’s fibers show that this does not need to be the case. Their materials can wick moisture, resist bacteria, manage UV exposure, cool the skin or help trap warmth. They are used in sportswear, outerwear, footwear, home textiles, as well as furniture and automotive applications.

Color is another part of the story. Cyclone relies heavily on dope dyeing, which adds color during fiber formation rather than through water intensive dyeing afterward. This delivers stable and permanent color while using far less water and energy. The company also offers a deep high fastness recycled Ultra Black that removes the need for traditional black dyeing altogether.

Cyclone’s R&D portfolio includes a wide range of functional and specialty fibers and here are a few examples:

• UVADE – UV-blocking fibers.
• ICE STORM – cooling fibers.
• HEAT HAZE – light-absorbing, heat-generating fibers.
• MICROLESS – biodegradable polyester.
• OCTALUME – acetate-style polyester with a soft sheen and fluid drape.
• BNWool / BNSuede – wool-like and suede-like synthetic substitutes.

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Managing Byproducts

Another element often overlooked in advanced recycling is what happens to materials that cannot be recycled. Cyclone diverts non-PET fractions into construction materials and insulation applications rather than landfill or incineration. This ensures that preprocessing does not simply shift waste downstream, a common hidden problem in chemical recycling systems.

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Environmental Impact and Traceability

Life cycle assessments from independent third parties show that Cyclone’s textile-to-textile process uses less water, less energy and produces lower carbon emissions than both virgin polyester and bottle-to-textile recycling. The exact numbers change as technology improves, but the trend is consistent. Chemical recycling, when run at industrial scale, reduces the overall footprint of polyester production.

Traceability is built into the system, with each batch of textile waste receiving a barcode at collection and new codes at every major stage – from sorting to pelletizing to spinning – so the entire journey from discarded garment to finished yarn can be tracked.

This system helps brands track how much recycled material they use, prepare for audits and prove their products are part of a closed-loop system, which is becoming more important as EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) laws make brands responsible for what happens to their products after they are sold.

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Operational Improvements Behind the Scenes

Cyclone also invests in reducing factory level impact. Its facilities use biomass fuels instead of coal, solar panels that provide a portion of electricity and wastewater systems that reuse up to 70% of water. Heat generated in one process is reused in another.

The company engages with programs such as the Higg Index, which provides tools to measure the environmental and social impact of facilities – from water and energy use to chemicals, waste and labor conditions – and is preparing to meet both SBTi (Science Based Targets initiative) and ISCC (International Sustainability and Carbon Certification) requirements.

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The Takeaway

Polyester dominates the global textile market and it is not disappearing soon. The question is how to keep it circulating instead of sending it to landfills. Bottle-to-textile mechanical recycling helped start the transition, but chemical textile-to-textile recycling is the step that creates real circularity.

What determines success is not just chemistry, but how well recyclers can manage feedstock quality, preprocessing and traceability at scale. Cyclone’s model – combining internal sorting, recycling and yarn production – shows how advanced systems can move from concept to infrastructure.

If the company reaches its projected 2030 capacity, circular polyester could become a mainstream production reality and we hope to see that happen.