Have you heard of recycled fabric? Do you know the use of recycled fabrics is increasing in different areas across the world, including fashion industry, interior design industry, car industry, medical fields, etc.? Sportingtex® has profound experience manufacturing recycled textiles and we keep improving fabric quality to offer the clients diverse designs of recycled fabrics. We’d like to share the experience that we explored during the development of recycled fabrics and will help you understand how we process the wastes into green textiles.
What is the meaning of recycled fabric?
Recycling has become common sense to be considered to be an environment-friendly routine. The meaning of recycled fabric is the fabric that it is made from recycled materials to refine a new valuable item.
What are the recycled materials that we can use to make fabric? Surprisingly, the garbage or wastage we dumped into the trash every day can be recycled, reused, and re-created. Therefore, trashes like clothing waste, food waste (such as fish scales) and plastic bottles are major types of materials that can be reused by using simple technological processes to produce recycled fabrics.
Nowadays, plastic bottles are the most critical issue that has environmental consequences to pollute our land and oceans. 481.6 BILLION plastic bottles were used worldwide in a year. That is 40 billion per month and 1.3 billion per year (data from H.o.W ). What can we do from these bottles? There are many advantages that can help us and our environment if we can reuse these tremendous numbers of plastic bottles smartly. One of the biggest innovations is to turn plastic bottles into fiber to make a new fabric.
How do you turn recycled plastic into fabric?
The process of making eco-friendly fabrics is simply cleaning all the collected plastic bottles. After cleaning, drying, and crushing into small chips, these chips will be melted, and then spun into fibers.
The reason why recycled fabric is sustainable
There are many garment factories, fashion brands, and yarn suppliers trying to develop more products via eco-friendly processes to make recycled fabrics. Another advantage to using recycled plastic bottles is that factories can use less water and chemical ingredients so that it can decrease the generation of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane.
What is “recycled polyester fabric”?
Recycled polyester is a fabric that is commonly used in the textile and apparel industry to make fabrics for sportswear and fashion apparel.
Virgin polyester fabric vs. recycled polyester fabric
- Polyester is a synthetic material made from crude oil, lots of water, and chemicals. There is an energy-consuming process that involved high levels of pollution and chemicals during production.
- Recycled polyester, also called rPET, it is made from raw materials, such as recycled plastic water bottles. With the processes of cleaning and melting the existing plastic bottles/boxes, then spinning them back into new polyester fibers. These fibers are used to produce recycled polyester fabric.
Use recycled polyester fabric instead of virgin polyester fabric
A major benefit of using recycled polyester instead of using virgin polyester is that recycled polyester fabric provides second life and even 3rd life to non-biodegradable materials, the reduction of bottles that would eventually be in landfills or the ocean. Another benefit is the garments produced from recycled polyester fabric are sustainable and can be recycled again, and it can decrease the wastage of the quick fashion as for the current trend. Plastic bottles are reused in the fiber production process, which has a great advantage in reducing pollution to the earth, drinking water, and air. This also means that less oil is needed to produce regular polyester.
Is recycled polyester fabric the same as recycled PET fabric?
Recycled polyester is the same as recycled PET fabric. Both fabric materials are made from likewise referred to as PET (polyethylene terephthalate). PET is the most popular material to use as it is durable and very light to carry. It is widely used for packaging foods, water bottles, salad dressing cases, shampoo, and even liquid soap.
Most importantly, the cost of PET materials is very less, most companies are happy to use it to pack various products. PET materials can be turned into different forms of polyethylene terephthalate (ext. clothing fabric fiber). Recycled polyester fabric is used widely in textile industry and garment industry.
Some also call it “recycled plastic fabric”
Recycled polyester fabric is mostly made from recycled plastic bottles and plastic wastes; therefore, it is also very often to be called recycled plastic fabric. When we use plastic products, we are used to knowing it is recyclable. How do we process the recycled plastic bottles into green-friendly fabric?
- The collected PET bottles are cleaned, dried, and chopped into small chips.
- Chips are melted and go across to a spin machine back into new fiber.
- The new fiber is knitted or woven into fabric.
- Fabric is moved forward to dye and sew with eco-friendly processes.
