Professional guide

Waste as resource

Five 2-liter recycled PET bottles create enough fiber to make a ski jacket.

Polyethylene terephthalate commonly abbreviated PETis a thermoplastic polymer resin of the polyester family and is used in synthetic fibers.  PET plastic bottles can be recycled after consumption. After consumer recyclables have been collected and sorted by type at recycling centers, PET products are crushed, pressed into bales, shredded, and refined into PET flakes. These flakes are transformed into the raw materials that innovative companies transform into new products. Depending on purity of the recycled materials polyester can be used today in most of the polyester manufacturing processes as blend with virgin polymer or increasingly as 100% recycled polymer. 

The majority of the world's PET production is for synthetic fibers (in excess of 60%) with bottle production accounting for around 30% of global demand. In discussing textile applications, PET is generally referred to as simply polyester while "PET" is used most often to refer to packaging applications, which can be recycled in to among other things polar fleece.

Kate Goldsworthy is a textile designer and researcher, working in the area of new finishing technologies, materials R & D and design for recycling. Her passion lies with tools for sustainability in the textile world, particularly the recycling and reuse of polyesters. Her project explores technologies that could potentially change the way we recycle our textile waste, placing the designer at the centre of a process of multidisciplinary design thinking and enterprise. By focusing on the concept of 'life-cycle design', her aim is to create beautiful and functional synthetic materials, while preserving them as monomaterials, suitable for future recycling.

Her project explores technologies that could potentially change the way we recycle our textile waste

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 2/3 less energy is required to manufacture products made out of recyclable plastic. Other studies show that the production of recycled plastic requires 2/3 less of sulphur dioxide, 50% less of nitrous oxide, and almost 90% less water usage. Antimony (Sb) is a catalyst that is often used as Antimony trioxide (Sb₂O₃) or Antimony triacetate in the production of PET. It remains in the material and can thus in principle migrate out into food and drinks. Concern over Antimony in textiles is not an issue, but since it is part of the polyester-process, it remains an environmental concern (see Polyester).

 Aside this external polyester bottle recycling numbers of internal recycling processes exist, where the wasted polymer material does not exit the production site to the free market and where the waste is reused at one and the same production circuit. In this way for instance fiber waste is directly reused to produce fiber.