Danville was once defined by textiles and tobacco. While its recent rebirth means that the city is now home to a much wider variety of companies, one fashion technology startup is touching both of its classic industries.
Circ is a so-called circular fashion company that recycles textile waste into new fibers in an effort to reduce the industry’s impact on the planet.
Its presence in Danville, which began because of the city’s history with the tobacco industry, is now helping to redefine the city’s relationship with textiles, which runs just as deep.
Dan River Mills was the largest textile firm in the South at one point, and it was the main driver of Danville’s economy for decades. When it closed its doors in 2006, thousands of people lost their jobs and the city entered an era of economic distress.
Since then, Danville has been working to build back its economy and focus on growth — and has been largely successful so far.
Though it creates fabric in an entirely different way, Circ is building on the legacy of Dan River Mills, said Taylor Greene, head of corporate development and sustainability for Circ.
“Dan River Mills was home to a lot of really cool innovations for textiles back in the ’60s and ’70s,” Greene said. “Danville was changing the game for textiles back then. Now, it’s cool to have an opportunity to create a different kind of game-changing technology.”
The company evolved out of a biofuel startup that located in Danville in 2011 and received a grant from the Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission to use tobacco as biofuel.
Eventually, this work moved into the fashion technology space, and the company now recycles textile waste into new fibers in an effort to “protect the planet from the cost of clothing,” its website says.
“If we continue to do what we have always done when it comes to fashion, we’ll have plenty of clothes to wear but no Earth to wear them on,” the website says.
According to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which works to promote a circular economy, the average clothing item is only worn seven to 10 times before it’s discarded. And consumers today buy 60% more clothing than they did 15 years ago, creating both more textile waste and requiring more textile production each year than the year before.
A 2021 study by the World Economic Forum found that the fashion industry, along with its supply chain, is the world’s third-largest polluting industry, contributing 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per year.
In response, companies prioritizing circular fashion and slow fashion have been cropping up in an effort to change the way the world consumes clothing.
Circ operates in the circular fashion sector, which Greene described as “a sister to slow fashion.”
Both sectors work to combat fast fashion, a term that refers to mass-producing clothes inexpensively, often in factories where employees are not paid a living wage or protected by fair labor practices, in response to short-lived trends.
And because they are made and priced cheaply, fast-fashion clothing items don’t last very long, incentivizing consumers to throw them away and buy more.
Slow fashion, on the other hand, describes an approach that is more environmentally conscious and more time consuming, resulting in higher-quality items.
And circular fashion refers to the effort to keep materials that have already been created in circulation, rather than sending them to a landfill at the end of their lifespan, Greene said.
Circ does this by recycling polyester and cotton-blend fabrics.
“The majority of what we wear today is not what’s called mono-material. It’s not just one thing,” Greene said. “If you’re going shopping these days, and you look at a label, it’s going to have two, three or sometimes more fiber types.”
Scientists at Circ have figured out how to take polyester and cotton blends, which make up a large majority of blended fabrics, and separate them at a chemical level.
Right now, the waste textiles that start this process come from “post-industrial sources,” Greene said — things like cutting scrap that may not even resemble clothing.
Once the polyester and cotton have been separated, Circ recovers those building blocks and regenerates them back into polyester and cellulose-based fibers to be used again, Greene said.
It’s a hydrothermal process, she said.
“Basically, we’re able to use water pressure, temperature and some chemistry. Our reactor acts like a fancy pressure cooker, and the polymer chain of the polyester breaks apart,” she said. “Then we’re basically building those building blocks back up.”
The patented process turns the polyester fibers into a liquid, separating them from cotton fibers. The polyester is preserved without damaging the cotton, allowing both materials to be reused in the production of new textiles.
Circ is the only manufacturer to successfully separate polycotton blended textile waste, a process that involves significantly less carbon emissions than traditional textile production.
There are other players in the circular fashion space, Greene said, but they’re mostly focused on single-fiber recovery — solely cotton or polyester — whereas Circ focuses on blended materials.
And because they’re made from recycled raw materials, Circ’s fabrics are also recyclable at the end of their lifespan.
There are even larger implications of this technology when you think about the massive reach of the textile industry, Greene said.
“Everybody wears clothes, but [the industry] is also every carpet ever made, the bedding in every hotel you’ve ever slept in, every towel you’ve ever used at a waterpark,” she said. “When you start to think about the scope of textiles, it’s gigantic.”
Weaving together the industry’s many strands
After Circ produces the fabric, the process remains complicated because the fashion industry’s supply chain is so disconnected, Greene said.
“Maybe you have cotton grown in India, and then it gets shipped to Vietnam to be processed, and then it gets shipped to Bangladesh to be spun into yarn, and then it goes to South Korea to be made into a fabric,” Greene said. “It’s important for us to be talking to all the actors along that chain, especially because we are introducing a new innovative material.”
Circ communicates with clothing brands as well as with their suppliers, she said. Among these brands are big names across the spectrum of the fashion industry, both sustainable and fast-fashion brands.
Patagonia, which is known for its commitment to sustainability and responsible fashion, was an early investor in Circ.
And Zara, a fast-fashion retailer, partnered with Circ for its first commercial launch to create a small collection of garments made with the company’s recycling technology. Zara’s parent company, Inditex, has also invested in Circ, according to a Vogue Business article about the collection.
The items in this collection, launched in April 2023, are “the first, to our knowledge globally, circular products made from polycotton waste,” Circ founder Peter Majeranowski said in the article.
The article also points to Zara’s reputation as a fast-fashion retailer, and questions the extent of the impact its partnership with Circ will have.
“It’s hard to see how a single capsule collection will change the overall impact that one of the world’s biggest fast fashion companies has on the planet, or its business model of relying on continued growth in production and sales,” the article says. “However, it does move the needle on what can be expected of how fast fashion companies source materials and opens up possibilities for handling garment end-of-life more responsibly and sustainably than today’s norms.”
And in October 2023, designer brand Mara Hoffman released “The Dress that Changes Everything,” the first luxury garment made with Circ’s recycled lyocell. The floor-length column dress is being sold online now for $1,195.
Mara Hoffman also committed to transitioning all of the lyocell in its products to Circ lyocell within the next three years.
Circ was recognized this year as one of 15 finalists for the Earthshot Prize, an environmental prize founded in 2020 by Prince William, which aims to discover and help scale innovative environmental solutions. There were more than 1,100 nominations across the world this year.
Though Circ was not one of the five winners of the prize, as a finalist, it will receive mentorship, resources and technical support from the Earthshot Prize Fellowship program, including access to a network of businesses, investors and climate experts.
Circ set a goal to be nominated for this prize when it was announced in 2020 and was proud to meet that goal in such a short amount of time, Greene said.
“It was a very high honor, and helped bring even more awareness to Circ,” she said.
In terms of scale, Circ is in pilot operations, and the company is now working on building its first full-scale industrial facility, which will likely not be in the United States, Greene said.
But Circ will always have a presence in Danville, she said. Half of Circ’s about 50 employees live in Danville or just across the state line in North Carolina.
“Dan River and other textile mills in the area helped propel different types of materials and finishing innovations and things that we still use today,” Greene said. “The overall system is a little bit broken because we produce so much and a lot of it is synthetic, with these different finishing chemistries that have had environmental and social implications. Being able to rewrite that in a way that’s better for the planet and its people is really special.”