MacroCycle’s shortcut to plastic recycling - see at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

MacroCycle is showcasing a breakthrough shortcut for plastic recycling at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, promising faster, cleaner conversion of waste polymers into high-quality feedstocks. The company’s process targets tough-to-recycle streams, lowers energy use and costs, and reduces emissions, enabling closed-loop manufacturing for consumer goods, packaging, and industrial materials. Attendees can see demos, learn about pilot results, and hear how partnerships with brands and recyclers could scale the technology globally. It’s a glimpse of circularity in action.

Reality check on recycling

Plastic recovery is lagging badly: barely about nine percent gets a second life worldwide and that grim figure actually looks rosy next to textiles, where roughly half a percent is recycled.

Why clothes are so tough to recycle

Garments rarely stick to a single material. Hardware like buttons and zippers adds headaches, but stretchy spandex is the real spoiler. Today’s comfy, high-performance blends feel great and turn end-of-life processing into a puzzle.

The unpredictability problem

“You can’t count on clean, uniform waste,” says MacroCycle co-founder and CEO Stwart Peña Feliz in an interview with TechCrunch. “Contaminants are effectively limitless.”

MacroCycle’s big swing

The startup claims a clever detour that could drop recycled plastic costs to match virgin resin. Their method selectively pulls valuable synthetics out of mixed textile waste and leaves the rest behind. MacroCycle is a Startup Battlefield Top 20 finalist and will be on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.

Lessons from the old way

Peña Feliz has seen legacy “chemical recycling” up close, helping run ExxonMobil’s plant that cracks plastics with heat into simpler hydrocarbons. It functions but guzzles energy and pumps out significant CO₂.

The spark to try something new

Witnessing that footprint, he decided change was overdue.

MIT connection

After leaving Exxon, he headed to MIT for an MBA and met postdoc Jan-Georg Rosenboom, who’d devised a fresh approach to plastic recovery. “It looked almost too good to believe,” Peña Feliz recalls.

From lab idea to startup

They began building a business in late 2022. The next spring, Breakthrough Energy named them Fellows, and they went all-in. A $6.5 million seed round followed earlier this year.

Polymer 101 (quick tour)

Plastics are polymer chains made from repeating monomers. Many chemical routes chop those chains into small pieces, sometimes down to monomers, so manufacturers can rebuild “like-new” material.

The ring-and-return twist

MacroCycle skips the heavy demolition. It curls polymer chains into ring-shaped “macrocycles.” With the polymer temporarily looped, solvents can rinse away impurities, many of which can be recovered on their own. Later, the rings are reopened and the chains stitch back together. For polyester, longer rebuilt chains mean higher quality.

Energy math that moves the needle

By avoiding all the backward steps, the process, they say, uses about 80% less energy than making virgin polyester. Comparable chemical recyclers often shave only 20–30%.

Scaling from beaker to barrels

A new reactor, roughly two thousand times larger than the one used two and a half years ago is coming online, big enough to deliver 100-kilogram (220-pound) trial batches. Fashion brands are already paying to kick the tires.

Chasing price parity

MacroCycle says it’s on track to sell at the same price as virgin once the first full-scale plant is built, potentially making them one of the only chemical recyclers able to claim parity.

Why economics is the unlock

Peña Feliz argues cost is the lever that displaces fossil-based plastics. Expecting giants to reinvent themselves out of goodwill is naïve; build a solution so financially compelling that not adopting it becomes the expensive choice.

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Source: techcrunch‍