#102 - Marco Bertone - Syntetica - Nylon's dirty secret

#102 - Marco Bertone - Syntetica - Nylon's dirty secret

July 16, 2026 · 58 min · Episode 102

About this episode

Marco Bertone discusses Syntetica's innovative approach to recycling blended nylon waste in the textile industry.

Subscribe to the newsletter: New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack **** 🌊 Can Fashion Break Free From Fossil Fuels? How Syntetica plans to turn the textile industry’s most complex waste into a scalable source of new materials. We’re joined by Marco Bertone , CEO and co-founder of Syntetica , a circular chemistry company building technology to recycle blended nylon waste. Fresh off a $30 million funding round, Marco is working on a problem few companies have been able to solve: recovering high-quality nylon from garments made with multiple fibres, colours and coatings. The scale of the challenge is difficult to ignore. More than 100 billion garments are produced every year. Many are worn only seven to ten times, while roughly 92 billion garments end up in landfill or incineration. In this episode, we unpack why the textile recycling system remains fundamentally broken — and what it takes to build a circular alternative that can compete with fossil-based materials on quality, performance and price. In our conversation, we covered: → Why fast fashion created a waste problem that consumer behaviour alone will not solve → Why blended fabrics make textile recycling radically more difficult…

People in this episode

Host: Hugo Rauch

Guest: Marco Bertone

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Syntetica, Michelin, Lu

More episodes of New Wave.

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the New Wave. podcast page.