Inditex signs €70m three-year recycled polyester agreement

Zara owner Inditex has formed a strategic partnership with Ambercycle, a Los Angeles based material science company, to help scale textile to textile recycled polyester. 

As part of this collaboration, the company has signed a three-year agreement to buy a significant portion of the annual production of Cycora – an innovative material made from post-industrial and post-consumer polyester waste – for more than €70m (£61m).

This purchase commitment will be key to support the construction of Ambercycle’s first commercial-scale textile regeneration factory. The scaled application of Ambercycle’s innovative molecular regeneration technology will make circular materials more widely available and accessible in the fashion supply chain. 

Production of Cycora at Ambercycle’s new commercial plant is expected to begin around 2025 and continue to be incorporated in Inditex product offerings over the following three years. 

Inditex aims to have 100% of its textile products to be made exclusively from materials with a smaller environmental footprint by 2030. As part of this commitment, the group expects to have 25% of the textile fibres made from next-generation materials that do not yet exist at an industrial scale. 

As part of this agreement, Zara Athleticz is also launching today its first capsule collection in collaboration with Ambercycle, featuring technical pieces crafted with up to 50% Cycora content. It exemplifies the immense potential of innovative materials to create highly functional stylish products with lower environmental impact. 

Shay Sethi, CEO of Ambercycle, said: “Ambercycle’s goal is to enable circularity by replacing virgin polyester with textile-to-textile regenerated Cycora. Our partnership with Inditex represents a monumental leap towards realising circularity at scale in the fashion industry.”

This collaboration is part of Inditex’s Sustainability Innovation Hub, an innovation platform that works alongside start-ups, academic institutions and tech centres to promote and scale new materials, technologies and processes that reduce the environmental footprint of fashion products and help move towards more sustainable and circular solutions.

The purpose of the Inditex Sustainability Innovation Hub is to minimise the environmental impact of raw materials and processes used in the textile industry. Each new proposal is evaluated considering its impact on social aspects, circularity, biodiversity and animal welfare, in addition to undergoing an environmental life cycle analysis. 

This analysis, performed on a lab test, includes sixteen different impacts in areas such as emissions, water and land use, among others. All of this contributes to ensuring that these innovations have the potential to deliver a lower environmental impact compared to currently available alternatives.

Javier Losada, Inditex’s chief sustainability officer, said: “At Inditex we are committed to achieving circularity in the fashion industry. We want to drive innovation to scale up new solutions, processes and materials to achieve textile to textile recycling. Ambercycle’s groundbreaking molecular regeneration technology transforms end-of-life textiles into new materials, effectively reducing waste and emissions in the production cycle.”