Sportswear company Lululemon has invested in the $30 million Series A round raised by Syntetica, a French startup that developed a novel approach to recycling nylon, whose properties make it too good to throw away but difficult to reuse.

Syntetica promises to recycle two types of nylon, Nylon 6 and Nylon 6,6, that cannot be easily separated from each other in textile waste collected from consumers, its CEO Marco Bertone told TechCrunch.

With tons of clothing ending up in landfills every year, a key reason for the fashion industry to invest in more circularity is customer perception, especially for premium clothing brands. Startups like Syntetica are also benefiting from regulatory tailwinds and recent price volatility that unusually affected nylon.

Over the past six months, geopolitical turmoil in the oil industry has led to quarterly or weekly renegotiations of nylon prices, Bertone said. “It’s been a wake-up call for many brands that have relied on nylon and petroleum-based synthetics for price and convenience, and have seen massive impacts to their system today.”

According to Bertone, this fits well with Syntetica’s pragmatic approach. “We have built the company with the clarity that there is no green premium. That if you want to scale real solutions for a sustainable world, they need to be cost-competitive, highly scalable, and partnerships must be created from the beginning.”

The startup’s partners include brands like Lululemon, as well as Victoria’s Secret and Etam, with a recycling project that could hit the market early next year. Syntetica’s Series A also had backing from a large apparel maker, MAS Holdings, “an acknowledgment of how important the issue has become,” Bertone said.

In fact, it is quite unusual for a supply chain player to invest in a player that has not yet scaled. But before its Series A, Syntetica had already closed a partnership with Michelin’s Center for Sustainable Materials to establish a commercial demonstration facility in the industrial company’s French home city of Clermont-Ferrand.

Unlike other startups in its field, Syntetica will not produce textiles itself, much less a novel material. The product of their recycling process will be pellets, which can then be used by others to make yarn for companies like MAS. “It’s a story of pragmatic industry partnerships with the right players to achieve buy-in across the value chain,” Bertone said.

With experience in fashion and second-hand e-commerce, Bertone is Syntetica’s businessman. But through Entrepreneurs First’s matchmaking-style accelerator housed at Station F on the Paris campus, he partnered with chemistry researcher Louis Monsigny. The duo then consolidated their collaboration in Reims, where they used the AgroParisTech laboratory.

They have since hired a CTO, Ash Ward, who previously worked for the failed battery company Northvolt, whose co-founder Peter Carlsson is also one of Syntetica’s advisors. For Bertone, their scars and firsthand experience with the ups and downs of climbing give them experience in when and where to take risks.

“As a startup, we have to be comfortable taking more risks than industrial ones, otherwise there would be no innovation. But there is also a line: when too many risks are parallelized, then it can become complex,” he said. This is also why Syntetica is not diversifying yet.

Although it could eventually recycle other materials or provide services to other industries, its goal is to use its funds to demonstrate its ability to produce hundreds of tons of pellets per year and deliver them to customers in the clothing supply chain. After that, Bertone said, “Syntetica will build facilities around the world, close to waste sources and textile production.”

While it has global ambitions, the startup benefits from being based in France. Its Series A was led by the Ecotechnologies 2 fund managed by the Green Venture team of Bpifrance, the French public investment bank under the France 2030 plan. It has also received support from the European Innovation Council (EIC) with capital and grants and through its acceleration program.

For these public backers, startups like Syntetica are part of a broader plan to strengthen Europe’s industrial capabilities while reducing dependence on fossil fuels. But the startup also hopes to generate profitability and is backed by private investors, including EQT Ventures, SWEN Capital Partners and family offices.

Syntetica also has competitors: some use an enzymatic approach to “eat” plastics, as well as chemical giant BASF, which developed recycled nylon. Still, after attending industry events, Bertone hopes they all grow. “If everyone had to scale to dozens of factories, we still wouldn’t solve this problem,” he said. “We all need to be successful for us to be successful as a society.”

Lululemon has also invested in other textile recycling startups such as Epoch Biodesign and Samsara Eco.