The supplies developer previously often called ELeather has a brand new title and $18 million in recent development funding from a number of the world’s fanciest manufacturers.

Now going by Generation Phoenix, the upcycler says its new buyers embrace Coach father or mother Tapestry, Jaguar Land Rover and Dr. Martens, plus lead investor Material Impact and prior investor Hermès.

The 15-year-old agency relies in Peterborough, U.Okay., and has labored with manufacturers akin to Nike and Delta. The upcycler intends to make use of the brand new money to broaden “into the posh trend and footwear classes,” Gen Phoenix mentioned in an announcement. The corporate claims it has diverted greater than 8,000 tons of leather-based waste from landfills to this point.

“Think about what can occur when waste is not wasted,” Gen Phoenix says in an aspirational message on its new web site. The upcycler tells TechCrunch that its “feedstock comes immediately from tanneries the place about 1/3 of a leather-based conceal is usually discarded.” Turning the leather-based waste right into a usable, leather-like product entails shredding and “entangling” it “round a high-performance core utilizing nothing however excessive strain water,” the agency mentioned.

Gen Phoenix’s “recycled leather-based” isn’t fully product of recycled supplies. A spokesperson for the corporate tells TechCrunch that its merchandise function “as much as 86% recycled content material,” together with recycled leather-based and recycled plastic. Nonetheless, the agency’s remaining product additionally comprises virgin plastic.

Gen Phoenix founder and CEO John Kennedy explaining the corporate’s leather-like product. Picture Credit: Gen Phoenix

With out sharing a selected deadline, a spokesperson for Gen Phoenix mentioned the corporate goals to “cut back and remove virgin supplies from their merchandise utterly.”

The upcycler can be “commercialising a bio-based coating system and bio-based substitutions for any artificial supplies used within the course of,” the spokesperson added. Hopefully, we’ll quickly see Gen Phoenix kick virgin supplies altogether.

Zooming out: Gen Phoenix’s inclusion of plastics is hardly uncommon, even for “sustainable” manufacturers. Fossil gas–primarily based supplies permeate the style enterprise. Polyester? Nylon? Elastane? All plastic.

Even the rise of recycled plastic fabrics warrants deep skepticism; the ensuing artificial clothes is never recycled, and the microplastics they shed go basically everywhere, together with the ocean, mountaintops, the insides of sea critters and even our personal our bodies. Addressing the business’s local weather and broader environmental toll calls for rethinking all the things, from how we dye fabrics to killing “fast fashion” altogether.