🌱 Ep 36. Recycling Nylon, Paper Electronics and Secrets to Scaling a Startup with Luciano Caruso and Chloe So (xFashion District)

This is a special episode in partnership with Fashion District London

What actually happens in the years between "the science works" and "we're a real supplier"? In this episode of No Ordinary Cloth, Mili is joined by two founders walking that tightrope right now — mid-crossing, not the polished after-the-fact version of the story.

Luciano Caruso, Chief Commercial Officer of Epoch Biodesign, explains how the company's AI-designed enzymes recycle nylon — including nylon 6.6, the tough, blended, historically unrecyclable material behind everything from yoga pants to tyre cords to under-the-bonnet automotive parts — at room temperature, without the heat, pressure and harsh chemicals of conventional chemical recycling. Fresh off acquiring a 52,000-ton-capacity polymer plant in Spain, he walks through what it actually takes to de-risk a deep-tech material business: technology milestones, then production milestones, then commercial milestones, each one making the next round of investment easier to raise.

Chloe So, co-founder and CEO of Pulpatronics, is solving a much smaller-looking problem with an equally large footprint: the roughly 45 billion RFID tags thrown away every year, each one built around a metal antenna that jams recycling processes. Pulpatronics turns paper itself into that antenna using laser-etched circuits, cutting CO2 emissions by 60% and cost by 30% — and she's candid about what it actually looks like to scale from 50 hand-finished tags a day toward the millions the industry runs on.

In this conversation, we discuss

* Why nylon — despite being one of the most useful materials on earth, from apparel to airbags to EV battery trays — is so stubbornly hard to recycle, and how Epoch's AI-designed enzymes "unbake the cake" at room temperature instead of using heat, pressure and harsh chemicals

* What's actually inside the RFID tag on every clothing hang tag, why it can't easily be recycled, and how Pulpatronics replaces the metal antenna with a laser-etched paper circuit

* The "valley of death" in plain terms: the gap between science that works and a business that's self-sufficient, and the different way each founder is trying to close it — technology, production and commercial milestones for Epoch; first repeat customers and manufacturing scale-up for Pulpatronics

* Why Epoch bought a 60-person, 60-year-old polymer plant in Spain rather than building one from scratch, and what "de-risking" actually looks like for a deep-tech material start