rPET: is it green or greenwashing?
Recycled polyester is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the fashion market, but is it green or greenwashing?
Let’s take a closer look at this edition of GREENEXT Talks!
©Patagonia
What is Polyester?
Polyester (PET)
Polyester (PET) is the most widely used fiber in the apparel industry, accounting for around 52% of the total volume of fibers produced globally. However it has an overwhelmingly harmful impact on the environment and ecosystems involved in production. As a synthetic fibre, it is made from petroleum derived chemicals and is associated with the risks of fossil fuel extraction, chemical spillage and biodiversity loss.
What is Recycled Polyester?
First produced in 1993 by Patagonia and Polartec, recycled polyester can be produced through a mechanical recycling process or through a chemical recycling process.
Mechanical Recycling Process
Mechanical recycling is carried out by first cleaning the bottles, sorting them by colour, and then chopping them into flakes. They are then melted down into chips and placed through an extrusion and texturing process to transform them into fibres.
Chemical Recycling Process
Chemical recycling is done by first collecting synthetic products, sorting, washing and breaking down the material. Using a series of chemical cycles, the PET is broken down before being spun into yarn from the resulting material.
©Patagonia
At the moment, 99% of recycled polyester comes from PET bottles while 1% comes from wastes polyester fabrics, ocean waste and pre-consumer processing leftovers.
The PROS of Recycled Polyester
It keeps plastic bottles from going to landfills
Recycled polyester gives a second life to a material that’s not biodegradable and would otherwise end up in landfill or the ocean. Transforming plastic into fabric works as one way to help minimise the 8 million tons of plastic that find themselves in our oceans every year. This can help to protect marine ecosystems and underwater wildlife that is often endangered by plastic pollution.
©ADKN
It has a lower impact than virgin PET
Recycled polyester is almost the same as virgin polyester in terms of quality, but creating rPET is less polluting, too. According to Sustainable Apparel Coalition’s Higg Material Sustainability Index, each kg of mechanically recycled polyester represents a reduction in GHG emissions by more than 70% as compared to virgin polyester. WRAP estimates rPET’s production to reduce CO2 emissions by 32% in comparison to regular polyester.
It reduces the use of crude oil
In addition, recycled polyester can contribute to reduce the extraction of crude oil and natural gas from the Earth to make more plastic. “Using recycled polyester lessens our dependence on petroleum as a source of raw materials,” says Patagonia, best known for making fleece from used soda bottles, unusable manufacturing waste and worn-out garments.
©ADKN
And Here're the Limitations
It does NOT help fashion circular economy of polyester garments
Recycled polyester garments are often made from recycled PET bottles, not from old polyester garments. So, it means that there are still a lot of non-biodegradable polyester garments in landfills around the world. And this is a lot if you consider that polyester accounts for 52% of the fibres used in the textile and apparel industry.
It’s not guaranteed recyclable again
Most people believe that plastics can be infinitely recycled, but each time plastic is mechanically taken back to chips and heated, it degenerates, so it cannot be recycled a second time, due to a steep decline in its quality. While chemical recycling poses a solution, very few scalable technologies can currently recycle old rPET garments into new rPET garments. As a result, one of the current challenges of recycled polyester clothing is that it is not guaranteed to be recyclable.
It still releases micro-plastics
Microplastic pollution has been detected in human blood for the first time, with scientists finding the tiny particles in almost 80% of the people tested, in a study released in March, 2022. Polyester - either virgin or recycled - generates plastic microplastics during each wash, which are released in the wastewater and then into the oceans.
Conclusion
©GREENEXT
Like with many things in sustainable fashion, recycled polyester isn’t a black and white issue or an instant fix to the environmental problems created by fashion production. We definitely need an increase of textile-to-textile recycling before polyester can be considered as a circular and fully-sustainable material. But at the meantime, what we need is clothing that is worn more so that we decrease the over-production and over-consumption cycle we’re in, for sure.