Recycled nylon, most commonly sold under the brand name ECONYL, is made through a genuinely different process than recycled polyester. It's a real environmental improvement over virgin nylon. It's still plastic, and it still sheds microplastic in the wash, the same as the fibre it's replacing.
How is recycled nylon actually made?
ECONYL, produced by the Italian company Aquafil, uses chemical regeneration rather than simply melting plastic down. Waste nylon, mostly discarded fishing nets, old carpet, and fabric scraps rather than plastic bottles, is broken down through depolymerization back into caprolactam, nylon's base molecular building block. That caprolactam is then purified and re-polymerized into new nylon fibre.
The result is chemically identical to virgin nylon, not a downgraded version of it. Because the polymer is rebuilt from its base monomer rather than just reshaped, it can be regenerated again and again without losing quality, in principle indefinitely.
How is that different from recycled polyester?
Most recycled polyester, including the kind used in the majority of "made from plastic bottles" activewear, is mechanically recycled: the plastic is melted down and re-extruded into new fibre without breaking the polymer back to its base chemical building blocks. This is simpler and cheaper, but it's a downcycling process, fibre quality and strength degrade a little with each cycle, which limits how many times the same material can realistically be recycled.
Chemical regeneration, the process behind ECONYL, is more energy-intensive but avoids that degradation entirely. It's a genuinely different technology solving the same basic problem, not just a rebranding of the same process.
Does it actually reduce environmental impact?
Yes, by a meaningful margin. Producing recycled nylon this way uses significantly less energy than producing virgin nylon from petroleum, and independent lifecycle claims put the reduction in global warming impact at up to 90% compared to conventional oil-derived nylon. It also directly removes real waste, abandoned fishing nets in particular are a documented, ongoing source of ocean pollution and marine animal entanglement, from the environment rather than leaving it there.
Recycled nylon like ECONYL is made through chemical regeneration, a genuinely different and more thorough process than the mechanical recycling used for most recycled polyester. It meaningfully reduces energy use and diverts real ocean waste. It does not stop the fibre from shedding microplastic, because it's still the same plastic at a molecular level.
Does it still shed microplastic?
Yes. Multiple independent sources are clear on this point: because regenerated nylon is chemically identical to virgin nylon, its shedding behaviour in the wash is fundamentally the same. One manufacturer-adjacent source claims regenerated nylon is "engineered to shed less," but that claim isn't independently verified and is contradicted by sources that describe the shedding mechanism as unchanged since the fibre itself hasn't changed. Recycling the source material doesn't alter what happens once the finished fabric goes through a washing machine.
Does "closed-loop" mean something different from "recyclable"?
Yes, and the distinction is worth knowing since both terms show up on the same labels. "Recyclable" just means a material can theoretically be processed again, which is true of most plastic in principle. "Closed-loop" describes a system that actually collects a garment back and turns it into an equivalent new product, rather than the material vaguely being capable of recycling somewhere, sometime, by someone. ECONYL's regeneration process is genuinely closed-loop in the sense that its chemistry allows repeated regeneration without quality loss, but that's a statement about the material's technical potential, not a guarantee that any given nylon garment you buy will actually be collected and regenerated at the end of its life. That still depends on real collection infrastructure, which remains limited for consumer clothing.
So is recycled nylon worth choosing over virgin nylon?
If you're choosing between synthetic fabrics, yes, it's a clear improvement, lower energy use, real waste diversion, and no loss in performance or durability. What it isn't is a fix for the concerns that lead people away from synthetic fabric in the first place. If your reason for avoiding nylon is microplastic shedding or what sits directly against your skin, recycled nylon is a better-sourced version of the same underlying problem, not a solution to it. That's the same conclusion we reached looking at recycled polyester, and it holds here for the same underlying reason: recycling a plastic changes where it came from, not what it is.
Strand contains no nylon, recycled or otherwise, just organic cotton, hemp, and Tencel™ lyocell. See the full fabric breakdown, or shop the current collection.