GR3N raises €15.5 million to build Spain PET recycling plant

GR3N has raised €15.5 million to push its Spain plant from ambition into infrastructure, a meaningful test for whether textile-to-textile polyester recycling can finally move beyond showroom language and into the supply chains brands actually use. The Lugano-based recycler says the money will support MODUS, its first industrial-scale facility, designed for 40,000 tons a year and built to handle PET from both packaging and textile waste.

That matters because polyester is everywhere in fashion, from slick track pants to brushed fleece and crisp shell layers, yet the industry still struggles to reclaim it in a way that preserves quality. GR3N’s answer is MADE, short for Microwave Assisted Depolymerization, a process the company says can treat 100% of PET waste and turn it back into food-grade monomers. In theory, that solves the ugly middle of recycling: contaminated feedstock, colored resins, films and textile fibres that mechanical systems typically cannot handle cleanly.

GR3N is also pitching efficiency, which is where the story shifts from environmental promise to industrial math. The company says MADE can cut CO emissions by up to 80% versus virgin PET, and that its process is meant to sidestep the quality loss that haunts mechanical recycling. GR3N says it holds two patent families for the depolymerisation process and one for its proprietary equipment, a sign it wants to own not just the chemistry but the machinery needed to scale it.

The financing round was led by 360 Capital, with VP Textile joining as a new investor. Growth Capital acted as financial advisor to GR3N. The plant is being developed with Intecsa Industrial, part of the Cobra IS industrial group, which will handle engineering and EPC execution. GR3N says it has also secured up to €35 million from the EU Innovation Fund for the MODUS project, which it says is designed to recycle about 50,000 tons of textiles and packaging and avoid more than 2 million tons of CO over its lifetime.

The real test now is not whether GR3N can keep announcing milestones, but whether MODUS can clear the ones that count: reach commercial operation on schedule, deliver steady output at 40,000 tons a year, and prove that mixed textile and packaging waste can become consistent, high-quality PET feedstock at a cost brands can live with. GR3N once pointed to EPC starting in Q4 2024 and operations in 2027, while later reporting has pushed financial close to Q4 2027 and commercial operations to Q2 2030. That drift is exactly why this plant matters. In a market full of recycling rhetoric, brands will only treat polyester circularity as real when the factory runs, the output holds up, and the economics do too.