Tom's Cycle Recycling

plastic. For instance, a plastic bottle. And I'm not spinning a yarn. The small mountain of recycled trash in suburban Maryland is just a tiny part of the billions of plastic containers we throw away every year. Soda pop, juice, mouthwash, peanut butter, milk, cooking oil. They all now come in plastic bottles that are used just once and thrown away. But now some of this trash is being turned into clothing. In fact, some of the bottles Ernest Highsmith is picking up at the curbside will be transformed into sweaters. Actually 25 bottles go into each Patagonia polyester fleece jacket. 80% post-cons So generally this Coca-Cola bottle could be wrapped in this polyester fleece jacket someplace. Harry Benson of the company Wellman Incorporated is wearing a designer pullover made almost entirely from recycled plastic bottles. It's not as magical as you might think. It's actually a pretty simple process. This facility in Maryland is the beginning of what Benson calls a simple process. A largely automated, very noisy sorting of recycled waste. Plastic bottles, al They're shaken, poked, tilted and sorted, al Until Wellman Incorporated, a manufacturer of polyester fiber, gets what it wants. Polyethylene terephthalate bottles, PET for short. One of the most vol We pay actually a handsome amount of money for this material coming out of this facility. The Maryland Recycling Center makes up bails of PET containers. The bails are sent here to Johnsonville, South Carolina. It's just good business for Wellman Incorporated, which has built this plant to turn trash bottles into reusable plastic. From this unpromising mess, something beautiful and useful. Engineer Terry Turner. It's not harder from a chemistry point of view, and it's not harder from a basic mechanical point of view. The trick for us is to make sure that we eliminate the contaminants. The cleaning begins after a final sort. Sterilized, this plastic will be first rate. The irony in this is that bottle flake is one of the best polyesters that you can get. It's a fiber grade polyester. It has a very high molecular weight, and you need that high molecular weight to have good viscosity. The flake is ready now to be turned into fibers. First, strands about the size of h If you take a relaxed rubber band, it has essentially no strength. The more you pull it, the stronger it becomes. One of the things that we're doing in our process, By now, all that's left of the soda bottles is color, from the formerly green containers, green. From the formerly clear, white. Everything we've got on, yarn was made the same way, all over the world. The next stop is in western Tennessee. This is Albert Fawkes of Dyersburg Fabrics. The fibers he gets from Wellman Incorporated are so good, he can'tell the recycled from the brand new. When it comes to us, it's not much different. It still comes to us in bale form and the fibers are cut. The length we ask them to cut it. And so then we just take that fiber and process it pretty much the same way that we do virgin polyester. Ropes of fibers, white and green, are pulled into computer operated spinning machines. More automated equipment knits the spools of yarn into fabric. After the fabric is dyed, it's ready for the tailor. We pray a little bit more for the fiber from Wellman. But the product that we're making from it carries with it a higher price tag simply because it requires more effort, more processes, more man hours. And so the product is pricier from our standpoint. It's a price some cons This Patagonia jacket, for example, sold out when the material first came onto the marketplace. So that's an example of the type of demand for these types of products. People want to do something good and they want to have a high quality product. The demand for recycled bottle fibers is so brisk, Wellman has increased the capacity of its South Carolina bottle shredding plant. They can now handle nearly two and a half billion containers each year. That's about 15% of all waste PET in the nation. A substantial amount will be made into fabric and then clothing. As our concern for the environment grows, I think it's going to become a wave of the future and people are going to be looking for products that come from post-cons I just feel From what we've been told, the plastic bottle sweater is a big hit sold out. We suspect you'll be seeing all sorts of apparel and other goods recycled and resold.