Conventional recycled polyester—the stuff made from melted down plastic bottles—is akin to reheated leftovers, according to Syre chief commercial officer Jad Finck. The taste is sub-par, and it oftens ends up in the trash.

“As we know when you reheat something, kind of like…microwaving your lunch, it gets worse every time,” he said. “There’s a need—a very, very big need—to truly regenerate the difficult to recycle materials out there. And we’re starting with polyester.”

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The Stockholm-based textile-to-textile recycling venture has generated buzz in recent months, rising from the rubble of now-defunct Renewcell, the once-promising innovator that many industry insiders believed would revolutionize the sourcing of sustainable materials. Syre, like its predecessor in the space, reclaims polyester from textiles of all kinds, including poly-blends, regenerating the content into a pure polyester that can be used to create new fibers and yarns.

Finck, an ex-Allbirds executive, joined the firm just four months ago, around the time Syre made its market debut and announced the signing of a $100 million Series A funding round.

He said that while recycled polyester—the plastic bottle variety—has become “table stakes” across the industry, it’s not truly circular. That’s because the resulting material is a “downgrade” from its origin source, lacking in the same structural integrity and longevity of virgin polyester. In other words, clothes made from plastic waste end up languishing in landfills just like any other discarded garment from a shopper’s wardrobe.

But chemical-process-driven textile-to-textile recycling could be the “unlock” the industry needs to finally rid itself of its dependence on fossil-fuel-derived synthetics—and the industry is buying in.

“We don’t think of ourselves as a startup. We might be new in a sense, but we really think of us as a scale up, and that’s because the technology that it’s built on, this chemical recycling, textile-to-textile recycling, has actually been developed over a decade,” Finck said. “This is the inflection point time, where this technology is ready. It’s not just a future technology, but it’s time to truly regenerate plastic, because we need to go textile-to-textile, we need to be circular.”

Syre, like Renewcell before it, has the backing of global fashion giant H&M, which has promised to buy $600 million-worth of recycled polyester over the course of seven years. Not just an investor, but a client, Finck said such arrangements and offtake agreements are “critical” the building the momentum needed to get next-generation materials out of the startup stage and into the mainstream.