LOS ANGELES — More than 100 billion garments go to the landfill every year and Shay Sethi, the founder of Ambercycle, hopes to revolutionize the recycling of old clothes.
"It's good material. It's clean. It's not used for anything. I mean, what are you going to do with it?" Sethi said.
From old pants to aprons, every item is hand-cut to remove zippers and pockets. It takes a village.
"We put tables. We blast music. We have a bunch of our friends come in, and we just cut stuff out. You can't expect a solution to be perfect from the get-go. You have to do things literally yourself," said Sethi.
From there, it gets ambercycled, a name coming from transforming tree sap into amber. Sethi and his co-founder Moby Ahmed, as two college chemists at UC Davis, figured out a way to break down clothes and extract the polyester.
"Your closet is mostly a mixture of polyester and cotton, but the number one thing is becoming polyester," Sethi said.
This is how the process works: They receive clothes that otherwise would be thrown away. After cleaning, the clothes are placed into the machine, and then a secret chemical reaction occurs to break down the materials and separate fibers within the textiles on a molecular level from the polyester. The polyester is turned into small pellets that get sent away to another facility to be turned into yarn. This yarn is given to other manufacturers to make new clothes—the circle of life: clothing style.
"Designers, brands, manufacturers can take this material and make the same garments," Sethi said.
Five years ago, when Sethi and Ahmed were in school, they didn't understand why no one was doing this, knowing how many people get rid of clothes daily. They took it upon themselves to help the fashion industry using science. It is still in the early stages, only officially getting off the ground in a downtown Los Angeles warehouse in 2019, but the possibilities are endless.
"Not only are we reducing material going to landfill. We are also displacing material that would have been made from oil. So, there are two major benefits there, which we think can really make an impact on climate change and reducing our greenhouse gases," Sethi said.
He wants to protect our planet, and the movement is just getting started.
"Sustainability is no longer just a buzzy catchphrase. It's something that is imperative for not just us, but brands, retailers, manufacturers, everyone in the apparel supply chain to embrace because textiles are one of the few goods that literally touch us every single day," Sethi said.
Learn more about Ambercycle by visiting their website.