Cyndi Rhoades founded Worn Again (later to become Worn Again Technologies) in 2005, with a vision to eradicate textiles waste. Since 2012, the company has been in development of a world leading polymer recycling process for end of use polyester and cotton blend textiles which is currently in the industrialisation phase with a 1,000 tonne per year demonstration plant in development.
In parallel, and recognising that the post-consumer textiles supply chain is in need of automated sorting and pre-processing systems to supply future textile-to-textile recycling plants with feedstock, Cyndi set up Circle-8 Textile Ecosystems to address this urgent next hurdle.
Cyndi is an ardent advocate of textiles circularity, a thought leader and a regular public speaker, including at McKinsey’s Fashion & Luxury Roundtable at COP26 and at the Financial Times’ Climate Capital. She is an award winning entrepreneur: in 2021, Cyndi was selected as a global honouree for the Conscious Fashion Campaign, an initiative of the Fashion Impact Fund. In 2020 she became an Unreasonable Fellow, was awarded the PCIAW Outstanding Contribution to the Textile Industry and, in 2019, was a finalist for the World Economic Forum’s Circulars Leadership award. She represented Worn Again as an awardee for Launch, the US based initiative founded by Nike, NASA and IDEO.
Cyndi is an early pioneer of the sustainable fashion movement, a co-Founder of the RE:Fashion Awards, the world’s first Sustainable Fashion Awards, and more recently a co-Founder of World Circular Textiles Day.