Claras Materials tackles textile recycling’s feedstock shortage at scale

Textile recycling does not have a glamour problem. It has a feedstock problem, and that is where Claras Materials is placing its bet. The new company is aiming to do the unglamorous but crucial work of supplying advanced recyclers with a steadier stream of post-consumer textiles, the raw material chemical and fibre-to-fibre systems need if they are ever going to move past pilot scale.

The stakes are hard to ignore. The United Nations Environment Programme estimate cited by WWD puts global textile waste at about 92 million metric tons a year. Sarah Coulter of Accelerating Circularity has said only about 1% of the 90 million tons of textiles generated each year is recycled. At the same time, Barbara Maida-Stolle, president and CEO of Goodwill Industries of Northwest North Carolina, said her organization alone has 17 million pounds of textiles annually that it does not sell. The problem is not a shortage of discarded clothes. It is the absence of the collection, sorting and downstream supply chain needed to turn them into dependable industrial input.

That is the gap Claras Materials says it wants to bridge. On its site, the company describes itself as “bridging the supply gap in post-consumer textiles for advanced recyclers,” a telling shift from the easier post-industrial stream to the messier world of worn clothing. The company is led by Patrick Mullen, an industry veteran with 37 years in textile recycling, especially cotton and polyester-cotton blends. His pitch is less about recycling fabric itself than about feeding the machines that already exist and cannot run at full tilt without enough clean, sorted material.

The process matters. Claras plans to source post-consumer textiles from global used-clothing markets, sort them with near-infrared technology, remove hardware and prepare single-fiber bales of polyester, cotton and wool for recycling partners. That middle layer, the one between donation bins and advanced reprocessing plants, is where scale has repeatedly broken down. At the Textiles Recycling Expo USA at the Charlotte Convention Center on April 29 and 30, stakeholders from Goodwill, Fabscrap, SuperCircle and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation circled the same issue: collection and sorting infrastructure still does not exist at the scale the industry needs.

The broader market makes the urgency plain. Textile Exchange reported that global fiber production rose from 125 million tonnes in 2023 to 132 million tonnes in 2024. Polyester still accounts for 59 percent of total output, and 88 percent of that polyester is fossil-based. Recycled polyester remains overwhelmingly made from plastic bottles, at 98 percent, which leaves textile-to-textile recycling stranded at the margins. Claras Materials says commercial operations are expected in 2027. If it can deliver consistent volumes and quality, the real winners will be the recyclers waiting for feedstock, and the brands that need them to work at scale.