MacroCycle Found a Shortcut to Plastic Recycling — Find Out at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

Plastic recycling has failed. Only about 9% of plastic is recycled globally, which sounds pretty bad until you compare it to textiles. Only 0.5% of it is recycled.

One of the biggest challenges is that textiles are rarely a single material. Buttons and zippers complicate matters, but spandex is even worse. New synthetic blends are created for clothes that are a dream to wear but a nightmare to recycle.

“The challenge with recycling is that you can never predict your waste,” Stuart Peña Velez, co-founder and CEO of MacroCycle, told TechCrunch. “Your waste contains an infinite number of pollutants.”

MacroCycle has developed a shortcut of sorts, which promises to make recycled plastic as inexpensive as raw materials. The startup has devised a way to extract desirable synthetic fibers from textile waste, leaving everything else behind. MacroCycle is a Top 20 finalist in Startup Battlefield and is being presented at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.

Peña Velez knows the potential dangers of plastic recycling all too well. Earlier in his career, he helped operate ExxonMobil’s chemical recycling plant, which uses heat to break down plastics into simpler hydrocarbons. It works, but the process consumes a lot of energy and releases a lot of carbon dioxide.

“I saw it firsthand and knew something had to be done,” he said.

Shortly after leaving Exxon, Peña Velez decided to pursue an MBA at MIT. There, he met Jean-Georges Rosenbaum, who had developed a new method for recycling plastics while working as a postdoctoral researcher. “When I saw his technique, I thought it was too good to be true,” Peña Velez said.

The duo began turning this technology into a business in the fall of 2022. The following spring, they were selected for an Advanced Energy Fellowship to develop it further. “We looked at each other and said, ‘I think we’re doing this full time,'” Peña Velez said. MacroCycle raised a $6.5 million seed round earlier this year.

To understand plastic recycling, it helps to know a little about the chemistry of the material. Plastics are polymers, which are long chains of monomers, or repeating chemical building blocks. Most chemical recycling processes break down plastic polymers into smaller components, including monomers, so you can rebuild them into something indistinguishable from virgin plastic.

MacroCycle is different because it does not break down the polymers. Instead, it snaps the polymer chains back onto themselves, forcing them to form rings called macrocycles. These larger cycles remain behind, as various solvents remove contaminants, which can then be recycled themselves. Later, the loops are reopened to fix the polymer chain. “When the rings open, they want to combine with each other, and in polyester, the longer the polymer, the higher the quality,” Peña-Velez said.

“By not having to retrace all of these steps again, we are able to take a significantly more energy efficient approach,” he added. The MacroCycle process uses 80% less energy than it takes to make virgin polyester, while other chemical recycling processes use 20% to 30% less energy, he said.

Peña Velez said the startup is creating a larger reactor, 2,000 times larger than the one they were using two and a half years ago. It is large enough to produce 100 kg (220 lb) batches of material for customers to sample. MacroCycle generates revenue from fashion brands interested in the technology, he said.

“We feel comfortable being one of the few, if not the only, general chemical recyclers that can claim to be able to supply these materials at an equivalent price once our first industrial facility is built,” Velez-Peña said.

He is convinced that this is the only way for recycled plastic to replace fossil fuels in industry. “The bottom line drives a lot of innovation, and if you want players like ExxonMobil to change the way they do things, it’s not going to happen from within,” he said. “I want to be able to create a technology that is economically attractive so that the opportunity cost is too high for them to not adopt this new type of solution.”

If you want to hear MacroCycle live, see dozens of additional performances, attend valuable workshops, and make connections that drive business results, Head here to learn more about this year’s Disruptheld from October 27 to 29 in San Francisco.