More than 92 million metric tons of textile waste is produced globally every year, and most of this ends up in landfills or incinerators. At the same time, textile fiber demand is increasing, with the Textile Exchange estimating the global textile fiber market to grow 30% to 146 million metric tons by 2030 from 111 million metric tons in 2019.

Infinna is a unique, virgin-quality regenerated textile fiber with the soft and natural look and feel of cotton. It is created from cotton-rich textile waste that is broken down at the molecular level and reborn as new fibers. Because it’s made of cellulose—a building block of all plants—Infinna is biodegradable and contains no microplastics to clog our seas. Clothes made with it can be recycled again in the same process together with other textile waste. Infinited Fiber Company’s fiber regeneration technology, which uses cellulose-rich waste streams as its raw material, offers a solution both to stop waste from being wasted and to reduce the burden of the textile industry on the planet’s limited natural resources.

Infinna Fiber is the basis of Patagonia’s first closed-loop product, Tee-Cycle. Using Patagonia tees sourced from the Take-Back Program along with used cotton garments from the global recycling channels, Infinited Fiber turns the used tees into soft, resilient fibers called Infinna. Unlike other man-made cellulosic fibers like rayon or lyocell made from the pulp of trees, Infinna Fiber is made from post-consumer cotton garment waste that’s recycled into a new pulp and then into fiber. When blended with factory cotton scraps that would otherwise wind up in landfills, the result is a new tee made of 100 percent recycled materials.

Image Credit: Flickr by Hendrik Morkel