As Lycra’s partially bio-based elastane hits commercial volumes, Fashion for Good launches a pilot to validate lower-impact stretch fibres and galvanise support around nascent recycling systems.

When The Lycra Company first introduced a partially bio-based elastane to the market 12 years ago, it did not resonate in the way it hoped and it conceded the market just wasn’t ready. Eight years later, and with sustainability topics much higher up the agenda, it took another leap and signed a deal with Qore for a bio-based BDO that would lead to an elastane made with 70% renewable content. From the start, Lycra has signalled a strong intent to lower the product’s carbon footprint as well as its own, heavily investing in new facilities and setting up a refreshed supply chain. As of February this year, commercial volumes are ready. Lycra Renewable has been tested at mill parters, and the first capsule collections are on the shelves. The aim is that in a few years, half of Lycra’s elastane will be made this way. 

Stretch-providing elastane, also known as spandex, has traditionally been viewed as a “problem fibre” when it comes to end-of-life: recycling systems are set up for polyesters and cottons, but stripping the fibre out of fabrics has been tricky, with recyclers unable to work with blends higher than 5%. While it makes up only 1.4% of global fibre usage, elastane carries “outsized importance” due to the sheer volume of products it is used in, according to the Textile Exchange. In its 2024 Materials Report, the non-profit said elastane fibre production is increasing slowly but steadily, rising from to 1.2 million tonnes in 2022 to 1.4 million tonnes in 2023. 

While research into recycling solutions was ongoing, Lycra wanted to find an alternative route to lowering impact. Conventional BDO, often made from coal from China, is a precursor to polyteramethylene ether glycol, a major chemical intermediate which is combined with MDI to make elastane. Biotech company Geno invented a way to create a bio-based BDO using various forms of sugar sources – industrial corn, sugarcane or sugar beets – as raw materials, licensing the know-how to chemicals or fibre groups. Korea’s Hyosung is investing in sugar cane as a raw material, and in Lycra’s case, Geno’s process converts the starch from industrial corn at a biotechnology campus in Iowa, a joint venture between Cargill and Helm. It then heads to Asia to be used as an ingredient for EcoMade.

“There are several important things about this development,” says Alistair Williamson, Lycra’s vice-president of EMEA and South Asia. “From a sustainability point of view, the raw material comes from rain-fed corn rather than oil. A lifecycle analysis tells us this reduces the carbon footprint by about 40%, which can also help our customers reach their sustainability goals. The other aspect, for the mills, it’s the same product. It’s just a chemical change in the raw material so this makes it a drop-in replacement with no change in the quality.”

Consortium thinking

So far so good, so what then are the barriers for adoption? The first, according to Fashion for Good’s managing director Katrin Ley, is cost, with bio-based and recycled alternatives carrying a price premium (although this equates to only a few cents at garment level, according to Lycra). The second is performance parity: brands need confidence these materials will perform comparably to conventional elastane across processing, wear and washing; and the third is the lack of industry-wide data. “Brands are being asked to take a leap of faith and, in a risk-averse industry, that's a significant ask,” she says. “Our goal is to replace that leap of faith with evidence.”

The Netherlands-based hub has brought together Beyond Yoga, On, Paradise Textiles, Positive Materials and Reformation, with Ralph Lauren Corporation as an adviser, to test recycled, bio-based and alternative feedstock categories – although they have not named the fibre suppliers. Over the next year or so, the Stretching Circularity project will test t-shirts with 10% and 2% elastane, and investigate regenerated elastane made through emerging recycling innovations. “We’re at an inflection point where next-generation elastane solutions are moving from concept to commercial reality, and the industry needs validated data to act with confidence,” says Ley. “Without that, brands will continue to hesitate, and these innovations risk stalling before they reach scale.”

A triumph in separation

Last December, Lycra announced a breakthrough in its recycling efforts in partnership with Italy’s Radici InNova. Over four years, Radici developed a selective dissolution technology to recover both nylon and Lycra elastane from garments. The fibres were then respun and used to create a lingerie set with German brand Triumph. The process is economically sustainable because it allows for the recovery of both nylon and elastane, as well as the solvent itself, said the partners. 

The project showed proof of concept. “Many people see Lycra as a blocker, but it can be done,” says Williamson. “When the big recyclers started, they addressed the main hard yarns but didn’t focus so much on spandex. But the new recyclers are covering the spandex as well, as it’s very valuable. The problem is there is nobody who can do it at scale.” Separating elastane from polyester or nylon involves different chemistries, plus the molecular recipe of elastane varies between suppliers – not withstanding the logistics of collecting and sorting the garments in the first place. “The recycling will come, but it might take time,” says Williamson. “It’s a big investment, so we need a big enough scale for the costs to come down.”

This is the second stream that Fashion for Good wants to address. There has been significant momentum in textile-to-textile recycling in recent years, but elastane remains the “unresolved blocker” in the system. The teams will be working with pilot-scale recyclers that are able to separate and revalorise poly-elastane blends. Alongside that, they will assess whether the bio-based and other lower-impact alternatives are compatible with circular systems. 

“Technical feasibility and commercial viability are two very different things. Closing that gap requires action on multiple fronts simultaneously,” says Ley. “Infrastructure investment needs to follow - or ideally, anticipate - technological progress, and that requires policy signals as well as private capital.” Extended producer responsibility frameworks in Europe are starting to create those signals, but implementation is still uneven, she adds, and brands will need to pay for recyclable materials even before the recycling infrastructure is fully in place to create the business case for building it.

Nuanced storytelling

Following AGolde’s denim range made with Lycra Renewable last April, swimwear brand Arena has created a collection using fabric from Italian mill Carvico, first presented at the MarediModa show in Cannes. Italian hosiery brand Oroblù has also introduced two styles with EcoMade, following a survey that found sustainability was one of the top priorities for its youth-driven customer base.

Telling the story of bio-based or recycled product could add to brand’s storytelling – family-run farms in Ohio growing corn could resonate with US customers, for example – although the industry needs to resist the temptation to overclaim, says Ley. “Suppliers have done the hard work of getting these materials to commercial readiness, and now it's about building the ecosystem around them, generating validated performance data, creating the transparency tools that allow brands to communicate credibly, and fostering the kind of pre-competitive collaboration that helps the whole industry move together rather than waiting for others to go first,” she adds.

She believes there is genuine commitment among leading brands, evidenced by its consortium, but it remains concentrated among a relatively small group of frontrunners and pioneers. Most of the market is still in a wait-and-see mode, watching to see whether these solutions perform and what the cost trajectory looks like. “Our job is to generate the data and demonstrators that convert that hesitation into action,” she concludes. “If we can show that recyclable, lower-impact elastane works in real garments at real performance standards, the market case becomes much harder to ignore.” 

Arena uses a knit fabric called VitaLife, a blend of 78% Econyl regenerated nylon from Aquafil and 22% Lycra Renewable. “By introducing a bio-based elastane, we are reducing our dependence on virgin fossil fuels while offering the same level of performance and quality,” says Arena CEO Peter Graschi Credit: Arena

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