Blue Cast: Circ’s Arshiya Lal on Taking Circularity to a Commercial Scale
Blue Cast is a podcast series from the TENCEL™ Denim team. Each episode features a conversation with a special guest from within the industry or the fringes of the denim community. The following is a recap of Episode 506.
As the industry looks to expand circularity, one challenge has historically been the prevalence of fabric blends. Solutions have been able to process mono materials, but tackling compositions like popular polyester-cotton blends was trickier.
Textile-to-textile recycling solutions provider Circ’s chemical recycling technology is novel in that it can separate polyester from cotton. The polyester is processed into new polyester fibers while the cotton becomes pulp that fiber manufacturers can use for lyocell production.
In the latest episode of our Blue Cast podcast, Arshiya Lal, director of corporate development at Circ, spoke with Lenzing’s Tuncay Kilickan about the company’s game plan. The startup is currently in the phase of creating pilot collections with brands like Zara and Mara Hoffman with about 4,000 to 5,000 pieces, and it is gearing up for capacity growth. In late 2026 or early 2027, the company plans to introduce its first commercial-scale factory, and it wants to get the industry ready.
“We want to make sure that the brand has pushed some of this product…through their supply chain, so that when we do turn on commercial volumes from the factory, the supply chain is already there and the brand has already commercialized this once,” said Arshiya.
Reaching commercial scale is somewhat of a chicken-and-the-egg situation. Capacity must be there for brands to make larger collections, but recyclers also need guaranteed demand to justify and support their investments. “We do need long-term agreements very…quickly, because those long-term agreements are what we have to be able to use to fund our first factory,” she said.
Arshiya noted that the middle ground between lab volumes and commercial scale is a tough place to be for a startup, since minimum order quantities (MOQs) can be “crippling.”
Circ’s technology can make product with 100 percent waste inputs, but it often ends up blending in virgin material to reach the scale and MOQs needed. Although Circ’s prices are not the same as virgin fibers, the goal is to have a competitive cost that protects margins across the supply chain and is not a barrier to adoption.
As it looks to scale, post-industrial waste is a better fit for efficiency, pricing and availability, with plentiful cutting room scraps created by factories. But Circ is not overlooking the potential to turn consumers’ castoffs into new textiles. “When we start to introduce post-consumer, we see that the infrastructure right now for sorting and sort of guaranteeing labeling, the quality on post-consumer waste at the volumes we need, we aren’t there yet as an industry,” said Arshiya. “There are significant volumes of industrial waste and so we are starting there. But our plan really is to be able to introduce post-consumer waste as those pathways become more and more robust.”
Listen to the episode here.