“It’s a bit like the moon landing,” Adam Baruchowitz, cofounder of Return to Vendor, said of what he touted as the circular materials start-up’s — and, indeed, the textile industry at large’s — “big, big breakthrough”: 100 percent stretchable, fully recycled and recyclable nylon. And all without a lick of spandex.
This wasn’t an idle boast. One of the pain points that has thwarted textile-to-textile recycling at scale is the preponderance of elastane that’s blended into everything from denim to leggings. Those rubbery bits that give garments their springiness and malleability are designed to resist degradation, meaning they’re more difficult to dissolve or otherwise detach from fibers that recyclers seek to recover, such as cotton or polyester. Worse, because of their low melting point, they tend to clog up shredders and other machinery, disrupting operations. Ask recyclers what their biggest challenge is, and many will sigh, “elastane.”
“Imagine in 20 years of recycling clothes, how many times I’ve heard that spandex is the biggest impediment to textile recycling,” Baruchowitz said. “It can barely be even turned into shoddy because at too high a level of spandex, it gums up the machines. So if you have a truckload from like Lululemon, let’s just say, with a lot of spandex, you have to space out how it’s recycled.”
While Gangadhar Jogikalmath, Return to Vendor’s resident scientist, isn’t convinced that the Apollo 11 mission wasn’t faked — he later clarified that he was joking — he’s positive that whatever Return to Vendor is doing is no hoax. The New York firm, which launched in late 2024 after being in stealth mode for three years, has gone all in with applying monomateriality as the answer to the mounting problem of textile waste. After many months of “chemistry variations, broken-extruders, manufacturing setbacks,” he said, it appears that its instinct was the right one.
The overarching idea, which brands like Adidas have played with to varying degrees of success, is that making everything out of a single material eliminates the need to strip castoff garments of fiddly buttons and zippers, a time-consuming and often expensive process. It would also alleviate the equally thorny issue of separating blends — say, polyester from cotton or wool from acrylic because everything can be ground up as is. Most of all, it would mean bidding farewell to Lycra and its ilk.
As a protein chemist, Jogikalmath understands how proteins unravel. His experiments with nylon, specifically nylon-6 from discarded fishing nets and castoff carpet, found that disrupting the material’s structural bonds with certain green chemistry can imbue the molecules with a similar degree of “slipperiness” that can adjust its performance.
“I was using some of those learnings from the biosphere and putting them into nylon,” he said. “Can we make nylon stretchable? Can we make nylon act as if it’s blended with spandex but at a molecular level? Can we tweak the molecules the way they arrange themselves in nylon, so that they’re free to move about under stress, but when you remove that stress, they can recover? And can we do that without using solvents?”
The answers to those questions were yes, yes, yes and yes. Changing the way nylon assembles in the molecular stage can transform it from a solidly unyielding material like climbing rope into something with more buoyancy — for instance, a sports bra.
Return to Vendor created its elastane replacement’s proof of concept a year ago, but it was only last October that the Khosla Ventures-backed innovator created a “manufacturing-ready” version that it sent to a mill in Italy — “all the Kering brands use it,” Jogikalmath noted — to be spun into fabric. The result? The world’s first stretch nylon.
“It’s not even a knit that already has some innate stretchability; it’s a woven,” said William Calvert, Return to Vendor’s chief executive officer and creative director. “The mill we used is a stretch expert, and they were super impressed, so that was certainly encouraging. We’re doing another trial with them so that we can weave yardage for sampling, as well as put it through all the processes required for commercialization.”
From there on, the sky — or perhaps more accurately, the solar system — is the limit. Return to Vendor plans to assemble a full catalogue of items to “match the needs of the industry,” including what brands desire in terms of heat resistance, abrasion resistance, washability and dyeability, he said. And with a “little bit of extended producer responsibility thrown into the mix,” there is the potential for a closed-loop recycling system for high-performance materials that, with the right tweaks, shed fewer microplastics.
But first is finding the right brand partner. The company is talking to several contenders, but it’s looking for one that “wants to take this all the way to the finish line with us and create a truly monomaterial product,” Calvert said.
There’s a first-mover advantage, too: “The scale of products with stretch is enormous, in the trillions of dollars at retail,” he added. “So you can imagine, if some of that waste material is converted into monomaterial and wholly recyclable, you change the game. Billions of pounds of materials are made every year, and then they end up in landfills. Imagine a future where those billions of pounds of material are recaptured and used again and again.”
It helps that Return to Vendor’s material is already cost-neutral with virgin nylon, which is a “huge deal in the eco space,” Calvert said. It’s also a one-to-one drop-in, making the switch almost friction-free.
Another driver that could speed up the transition: legislation. The European Union’s ecodesign for sustainable products regulation, for instance, will soon require apparel producers to up their deployment of recycled materials on the one hand, and deal with their waste on the other. California may be the first U.S. state to pass extended producer responsibility rules for textiles, but it certainly won’t be the last.
“The timelines for fashion are several years,” Baruchowitz said. “So they’re either going to start taking ownership to reduce costs into the future with these impending legislations, or they’re going to be burdened with penalties. This is an opportunity for them to on-ramp into the responsibility.”
Return to Vendor isn’t stopping at nylon — or even with synthetic materials. Cotton, he said, is another huge opportunity, though it’s still too early to announce anything formally. That’s the next moon landing, Baruchowitz said.
