Inditex And Ambercycle Sign A Three-Year Agreement To Buy Regenerated Polyester For Over €70M

Inditex signs a three-year agreement to buy textile to textile recycled polyester cycora for over €70M. This purchase commitment with Ambercycle -the start-up behind this fiber-, is key to scaling this material with the construction of its first commercial facility. Zara Athleticz launches a capsule collection of technical garments made with up to 50% of this innovative material today.

‍Inditex has formed a strategic partnership with Ambercycle, a Los Angeles-based material science company, to help scale textile to textile recycled polyester. As part of this agreement, the company has signed a three-year agreement to buy a significant portion of the annual production of cycora – an innovative material made from post-industrial and post-consumer polyester waste – for more than 70 million euros.

This purchase commitment will be key to supporting the construction of Ambercycle’s first commercial-scale textile regeneration factory. The scaled application of Ambercycle's innovative molecular regeneration technology will make circular materials more widely available and accessible in fashion’s supply chain. Production of cycora at Ambercycle’s new commercial plant is expected to begin around 2025 and willcontinue to be incorporated in Inditex product offerings over the following three years.

Inditex aims to have 100% of its textile products to be made exclusively from materials with a smaller environmental footprint by 2030. As part of this commitment, the Group expects to have 25% of the textile fibers made from next-generation materials that do not yet exist at an industrial scale. Cycora, a regenerated polyester created from end-of-life textiles, seamlessly replaces conventional polyester.

As part of this agreement, Zara Athleticz is also launching today its first capsule collection in collaboration with Ambercycle, featuring technical pieces crafted with up to 50% cycora content. It exemplifies the immense potential of innovative materials to create highly functional, stylish products with lower environmental impact. The collection will be available at Zara.com.

"Ambercycle aims to enable circularity by replacing virgin polyester with textile-to-textile regenerated cycora. Our partnership with Inditex represents a monumental leap towards realizing circularity at scale in the fashion industry" said Shay Sethi, CEO of Ambercycle.

Javier Losada, Inditex’s CSO added, "At Inditex, we are committed to achieving circularity in the fashion industry. We want to drive innovation to scale up new solutions, processes, and materials to achieve textile-to-textile recycling. Ambercycle’s groundbreaking molecular regeneration technology transforms end-of-life textiles into new materials, effectively reducing waste and emissions in the production cycle”, added Javier Losada, Inditex's CSO.

Inditex’s Sustainability Innovation Hub
This collaboration is part of Inditex’s Sustainability Innovation Hub, an innovation platform that works alongside start-ups, academic institutions, and tech centers to promote and scale new materials, technologies, and processes that reduce the environmental footprint of fashion products and help move towards more sustainable and circular solutions.

The Inditex Sustainability Innovation Hub aims to minimize the environmental impact of raw materials and processes used in the textile industry. Each new proposal is evaluated considering its impact on social aspects, circularity, biodiversity, and animal welfare, in addition to undergoing an environmental life cycle analysis. This analysis, performed on a lab test, includes sixteen different impacts in areas such as emissions, water, and land use, among others. All of this contributes to ensuring that these innovations have the potential to deliver a lower environmental impact compared to currently available alternatives.