YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Majeranowski

lines on the record: 34
first: 2023-09-07
most recent: 2023-09-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, intite text, the parent of Zara just put out their targets where they want to have 40% of their clothing made from recycled sources, an additional 25% from next generation materials, which we would fall in both categories. And you also have regulation coming. Now you have this huge industry that's super optimized that has to fix itself and has largely been unregulated. And I look at the paper recycling industry as a great example from 1990 to 2000. That industry added 60 million tons a year of annual capacity the following decade, another 70 million tons of annual capacity for a total of 130 million tons. And that's right on the same order of magnitude as what we're doing today with textiles. And so I think this very old and optimized industry can be transformed in 20 years.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I think Most people don't know who makes their clothing, how it's made, where it comes from, including fashion executives. And so that's a big, big, big challenge. And so we're starting with non-Virgin materials as just the beginning. You also have to think about labor, water usage, your total life cycle assessment, which is a term of art for how much greenhouse gas emissions you're producing. And so it's a really 360 problem that has to be solved.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have partnerships with various brands. Some of them, of course, are investors like Patagonia and Zara, Avery Dennison is another one, Zalando in Europe. And we have a calendar set out for several more product releases. And those product releases are really important because they help us educate consumers. As you mentioned, we're buying this stuff and we're feeding this industry. And I think it's for so many reasons. I mean, clothing is such a personal thing. I like to say it's the only artistic thing most people do every day. And when it doesn't match your values, that's a challenge. And so that reckoning is starting to happen now in the industry for clothing.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I should also say they're investors. We were their first technology investment, and they've been fantastic partners to work with. And it's not common for a brand to share that key real estate on a garment with another company. And so we were very proud that they agreed to put our name there.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did it was a four piece collection we've released back in May during Design Week in Milan. It was the world's first collection made from polycotton waste.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it happens very, very quickly. It's a continuous process too. So we're now doing it in a continuous way. But from end to end, it's about 15 minutes.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we are, you could say roughly 15,000, 20,000 garments a day or current scale, so something more about 250,000 garments a day.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we are at a commercial pilot scale at about five tons per day in Springfield, Ohio and in Danville, Virginia. And we are doing that with engineering partners that provide equipment and other solutions to various industries. And that's how we've been able to build and scale our solution very quickly. But the bulk of the funds we've recently raised are going towards the engineering and planning for our first really large scale integrated facility. And that would process about 65,000 tons per year.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we are attacking that problem from a couple angles. We are working with people that are just focused on the collection and aggregation of waste. We're working directly with factories that have waste. When we work with brands, you mentioned Zara, for example, we also ask them about their waste and about their factories and to direct us to those factories or to direct those factories to give us their waste. So that's been somewhat effective right now.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's a significant amount that can't be put back into use and they're landfilling that right now. Also hospitals use a lot of textiles. Law enforcement uses a lot of textiles. Universities do. So those are all great sources of post-consumer waste that doesn't necessarily have to come from a household.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly about 15% hits the factory floor. And so that's a very good source for waste as other solutions are scaling in terms of how do we collect from households, sort, and get those to providers or recyclers like us. There's also a whole other class, there's uniform companies, for example, that process a lot of uniforms. They're essentially big laundries that are constantly washing things.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Combination of sources, and unfortunately for the planet, but fortunately for business, there's no lack of input material. We get a lot of material from cut and sew factories to make a shirt. It takes about another shirt worth of waste along that whole supply chain to produce it. And most of it is that that final step when you're cutting patterns.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. We believe we have all the clothes we need to make all the clothes we'll ever need. And when you look at the scale of this industry, it's massive. And a lot of it ends up in landfill within a year or two. And so there's a lot of material there that is in a linear system that really should be recirculated so we can continue to use those resources.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lot of chemical engineering, a lot of water treatment. We're doing filtration steps to remove the dyes and other finishing chemistry so that we can then use that water again.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so whenever you have a chemical engineering process, you always have a little bit of loss from just material handling and things like that. But the polyester can get repolymerized and unpolymerized back and forth essentially infinitely”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. That's the beauty of it. When you reverse the reaction of making polyester, you're breaking it down to its original building blocks. And those building blocks dissolve into water. So essentially, you're dissolving away the polyester and also separating it away from the cotton. So now you have a solid stream with the cotton and a liquid stream with the polyester building blocks.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we shred it, put it through our process. That strips out the dyes and other finishing chemistry. And what we're left is with a very high purity cotton cellulose and those polyester building blocks that can be used for making new clothing.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Serious, serious money. Yeah, a lot of people wanted to know when they could start sending truckloads over, when they could start buying recycled material, and we're still on that path. Yeah, it is very capital intensive. We're talking about significant.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Manufacturers, but also brands. One of our first cold calls was from Patagonia. And they have a take-back program where you can come in with a Patagonia garment that's used. It doesn't matter how old it'll give you some value for it. And then they try to resell it. Or they'll even try to repair it to resell it. But if they can't repair it and resell it, they've been warehousing it. So they had this big problem of warehouses full of end of use clothing that needed to be recycled. And so that was what drove that phone call.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not quite. We were trying a bunch of things. We were throwing basically spaghetti against the wall to see what would stick so we could continue on as a company. And when we figured out the textile recycling, we didn't honestly think it was solving a big problem. We didn't know at the time. And then we started immediately researching things to Google and other resources and saw that it was a really big problem.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We gave them a high purity cellulose or a high purity pulp that could go at the very beginning of the supply chain to make fibers like viscose, rayon, or lycel. So we had two streams coming out of our process. We had the high purity cellulose or pulp, but we also had the building blocks of polyester, which traditionally come from oil and gas industry.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was one of the iterations. Great research there. Yeah, we were looking at just continuing with tobacco. And so we looked at how to apply that hydrothermal know-how to make non-tree pulp for packaging, paper, you name it. And it turns out the highest or one of the highest qualities of pulp or cellulose goes into clothing, about 300 million trees a year. And that's when a Swedish trading company, they traded primarily in paper and pulp, but they also had a recycling business. And they were the ones that suggested we try running some old t-shirt through our process to see if we could recover anything. And it worked.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were creative. We make one plus one equal five all the time. But we did have some investment from individuals, high net worth individuals. And we had millions of dollars of grants from the Virginia Tobacco Commission, for example. So that allowed us to develop this technology, which is now the bedrock of CERC.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I can now see in retrospect is there are so many compounding risk factors. You had to find farmers willing to grow it. You had to deal with a plant that didn't have any other application. And also the timing was pretty bad. There was a lot of big failures in biofuels in general. And so a lot of the investment community, the venture fund, said, look, our hands are tied, even if we wanted to, we're not permitted to invest anymore in biofuels. And so it was a scary time. We could see, as I say, the end of the earth, our runway getting smaller and smaller, and we had to quickly scramble to find new applications.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, nothing like that. We would harvest it fresh. We were using combines to do it, chop it up. The juices, when you harvest it, we would press out because those already had high amounts of sugar that we could extract for fermenting into ethanol. And the remaining biomass, we put through this hydrothermal process where we could use water to act like molecular scissors, basically to cut down the cellulose into glucose and extract the oil.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is not a typical tobacco plant. They grow really large. We treated them differently. We grew more per acre. And we would, what was good about it is that tobacco grows in over 100 countries around the world. And we could get good yields per acre.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Or maybe more like cars and trucks. We were specifically targeting ethanol and biodiesel. Doing it with a crop that is not a food crop and can grow almost anywhere in the world.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, one of my first jobs in the Navy, I was boarding ships, smuggling oil out of Iraq against UN sanctions. And we'd usually have to sit on those ships after we intercepted them for 18 hours at a time. So I had a lot of time to think about the geopolitical nature of energy and oil. And that really ignited a passion inside of me to look at alternative fuels and how amazing it would be if you could democratize energy, take these large poker chips away from bad actors around the world. I mean, we're still seeing this today in Europe with the war in Ukraine. And so when he mentioned that to me, and it happened to be during this global recession where I was not active anymore, I thought this is something I could really dig my teeth into. And so the next thing we know, we're starting what's now cirque, but at that time was called Titan Biosciences.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“World War II, yeah. And so I was just visiting him having dinner at his house, and he was talking to me about his foundation and the research they were doing in plant sciences specifically. His vision was to use plants as a vehicle for vaccines to develop vaccines, grow vaccines. And he was really frustrated with the uptake from the FDA and other sources. So he started applying that know-how to look at industrial applications. And over dinner, he told me that he just had a patent granted and a lot of press around an engineered non-smoking tobacco plant that could be used for biofuels.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Hillary actually is an old family friend. My father went to medical school with Hillary in Warsaw until the war broke out. And my father had to escape. And they reconnected after the war.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, what we were doing already in Eastern Europe was pretty entrepreneurial, but I felt that I could use more sophisticated tools and just be better. And I wanted to expand my network. And so it felt like a logical next step for me.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it was a small group investing in mainly new NATO countries that were soon to join the EU. So these would be countries like Romania or Bulgaria. Where it was still very emerging markets with a lot of opportunity and I was excited to go there. My Pentagon boss was a civilian. He had a lot of experience in those markets. And so we went there to invest US dollars into these emerging opportunities. And for me, I already got a bug for business and how enterprise can move economies and move countries. And I was very interested in that. And so for me, Eastern Europe was a great place to cut my teeth and really take on a lot of tasks.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On land actually. And the first person I met when I entered Iraq was at that time General Petraeus. And he said, what is a sailor doing in the middle of the desert? And as the Iraq war was getting underway, they really needed support in terms of analysis on the private sector that existed and how that could be utilized in a post-Saddam Iraq to help reconstruct the country. And so I was writing a lot of white papers in the Pentagon, and then I was tapped to actually go over to Iraq and support various missions.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was on board a cruiser on its way into the Arabian Gulf quite a time to be in the service. We immediately suspected it was Osama bin Laden and we were instead of continuing on into the Arabian Gulf, we stayed right where we were off the coast of Pakistan and participated in the response. So I had really first front row seats to the conflict.”
2023-09-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Threading the future of circular fashion with Peter Majeranowski of Circ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT