Three college graduates – two engineers and an economist – are the forces behind Rezero, an Irish company recycling unopened cigarette filters into sustainable alternatives that include buttons, insulation fibre and luxury eyewear frames.
“We are turning waste into something useful,” says Trinity College economics graduate, Rezero chief executive Michael Wylde, who founded the business with partners Jack Hartnett, a recycling engineer, and financial head Johnnie Bell three years ago.
Since then, the company has recycled more than 150 million filters that would have otherwise been incinerated, into raw cellulose acetate to make new products. It will recycle more than 1 billion filters a year by 2027.
The figures they provide speak for themselves; 700 billion unconsumed cigarettes coming from industrial waste are incinerated each year. So one in 10 cigarettes that are made are destroyed.
It all started when Wylde searched Google to find out what was in cigarette filters and discovered that they contained cellulose acetate (CA), a biodegradable environmentally friendly product derived from natural wood pulp with multiple applications and uses including desalination membranes making seawater drinkable, acoustic absorption, photographic film and the first ever plastic Lego pieces.
“I was always keen to have a recycling business and this was a catalyst, the realisation that repurposing unused cigarette filters could have commercial potential”, Wylde recalls when we meet at their headquarters in the CHQ building on Custom House Quay in Dublin’s north docklands.
“We needed a large source of supply and to get engineers on the project so we could develop the recycling process. We managed to get access to customs in Ireland and several other EU countries. The Government seizes about over 100 million zero use cigarettes in Ireland every year and close to 10 billion have been seized across Europe,” he explains.
“We are now the only company in the world working with multiple EU customs.”
The process of removing the filter papers to isolate the CA was developed using a machine designed and funded by securing an initial private investment of €50,000. While Rezero has customers for the raw material itself, their focus is to target the fashion industry and become the leading EU button and fashion accessory producer.
They found an old button machine in Smallwares in Castlebellingham, a company founded in 1936 as a button factory, the first of its kind in Ireland. It remained in production until the 1990s when button making was outsourced to eastern Europe.
To make the buttons, Rezero converts the fibre into pellets using solar energy and these pellets are then moulded into buttons of any shape and any colour. “Injection moulding is the most resource efficient way of making buttons as there is no waste created in the process,” Wylde says.
So far, their buttons have attracted the attention of the independent British fashion designer Robert Newman, who designs for the luxury Italian sportswear brands CP Company and Stone Island and US clothing brand Supreme. He is using the 7,000 buttons which Rezero has supplied in some of his own upcoming collections.
Rezero is also in commercial sample development under NDAs with two high-profile luxury international brands in Italy and France with the aim of producing sleeve branding, eyewear and buttons. “There is very little innovation in the button industry and our goal is to target brands who want to replace their existing buttons with green alternatives. We want to be suppliers to Irish and UK brands and increase button production in Ireland,” Wylde says.
He notes that 80 per cent of the world’s buttons are made in China, which employs 600,000 people using cheap fossil fuels “and that is a figure we want to see come down”, Wylde says.
“Brands which may stress sustainable materials or their ethical manufacturing credentials say nothing about their buttons – buttons have become the silent overlooked components of garments. Buttons, and their vital functions, went from being valued to being purely functional components bought as cheaply as possible”.
Rezero aims to sell more than one million a year starting in 2025 and will be taking part in the Future Fabrics Expo trade fair in New York on November 19th, which is the largest global sourcing destination of sustainable textiles and materials. They also have a meeting with one of the world’s biggest shoe brands in the US about shoelace tips called aglets, which are usually made from plastic or metal with the idea of discussing replacements with virgin CA in millions of laces.
Additional funding of €150,000 has been raised from private sources and Enterprise Ireland to fuel development and, having realised the absorption and insulation potential of their fibre in soft form, they are keeping some of the material aside to explore further possibilities of its performance qualities.
At a recent event in Magees in Dublin, Vision Creative Studios, which provides solutions for the interiors of corporate headquarters of Google, Meta, Amazon, Pfizer and others, showcased innovative acoustic systems for buildings using tweed along with Rezero’s Irish acoustic fibre.
“Ultimately, however, our aim is to become the leading EU button and fashion accessory producer, to be the YKK [a company that makes more than 7 billion zippers a year] of buttons is our dream,” Wylde says.
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