Who is Dr. Jade Bouledjouidja, and how has she developed a textile recycling solution that tackles one of fashion’s most persistent challenges: separating polycotton blends at scale? And then, how did she raise $11.5 million (€10 million) in seed funding to tackle fashion waste just a year after validating her novel technology? Family roots, an unwavering mission to ensure nature endures, and a distinctly engineering-led approach to solving textile waste offer some answers.
“I’ve been fascinated by machinery since I was a child. My grandpa was a farmer, and I loved to see the tractors and all the machines working–it was my dream holiday to go to the farm”, says the French Algerian chemical engineer and founder of Stockholm-based textile recycling startup Renasens.
Dr. Bouledjouidja’s love of machinery and its workings led her to study engineering, with a focus on chemical applications in the medical sector. Her studies included the impregnation of medical sutures with coatings to enhance their biochemical and structural function. It was applying this understanding of how to chemically bond materials to each other that helped her unlock the key to removing the dyes and coatings from waste textiles, followed by separating the fibers for reuse in new textiles.
A new approach to textile recycling using supercritical CO₂
The engineer’s technology uses supercritical carbon dioxide (a fluid) as the solvent (dissolving solution) rather than water or harsh chemicals, thereby reducing water and energy use and the overall footprint of the recycling process. While the use of supercritical CO₂ is not novel, the application for textile recycling is.
“The gas is held at a specific temperature and pressure, and we change its properties to [elicit] an extraction and impregnation process, making the fabric swell to extract all the dyes and PFAS (a toxic waterproofing coating) and preserve the fibers”.
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