PET Water Bottles
I Used 2 B Your Plastic Water Bottle
Most of our plastics are chemically derived from oil by-products. Plastics can also be made from plant based materials such as plastic bags made from corn, but the overwhelming majority is oil based.
Plastic drinks bottles are made from a kind of plastic called Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET). When this is recycled it is called RPET. The most successful PET recycling is into fibre - most notably fleece.
Uses for RPET
Textiles - One recycled fleece jacket uses 25 PET bottles. Recycled textiles are manufactured in Massachusets, Vancouver and Quebec using North American waste streams. Geotextiles and backpacks.
Fibrefill for sleeping bags, toys, pillows, quilts and ski jackets
Upholstery Foams
Industrial Strapping
Carpets
Ideally, plastic containers could be recycled back into drinks containers, however this process is still being developed to successfully pass food safety regulations without exorbitant costs. Although as the price and scarity of oil grows then so does the feasiblity of recycling (RPET can be added to packaging by sandwiching RPET between layers of virgin PET thus answering food safety concerns and using 50% RPET).
Virgin Polyester (not recycled) for PET comes from combining two oil products: terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol (aka antifreeze) which is heated to a temperature of approximately 400F when combined in large vats (turning it into a chemical called dihydroxydiethyl terephthalate) then heated under pressure (just like a home pressure cooker) to 536F resulting in PET. This cools into a gel-like liquid which is pushed (extruded) through sieves, cooled and broken into pellets. At this point PET can either be made into plastic drink bottles or these pellets are reheated and extruded through metal sieves (called spinnerets) and as the liquid cools it forms fibres. The fibres are wound onto a heated spool and this thick rope is called Tow
Recycled Polyester Fibres from RPET: It all starts with you and me recycling our plastic containers.
The bottles are flattened and tied into large bales and then sold on to recyclers. The bottles are sorted by colour and workers remove caps and foreign material. PET is heavier than PE (caps) so in a water bath the caps float and bottles sink (at every recycling and waste conference and tradeshow there are new machines every year that can sort and process recycled materials).
The bottles are baled and sold to yarn makers by the recyclers.
At the yarn manufacturing plants, the sorted plastic goes into cleaning bath, dried and then crushed into tiny chips. The light colours are bleached and the green bottles stay green to be later dyed a darker colour.
The chips then go into a vat, heated and the resulting syrup is forced through spinnerets into long thread or fibres; these fibres then follow the same processes as for the virgin polyester.
The ropes are then spun and twisted in machines into varying thicknesses onto spools which are then sold to textile manufacturers. The yarn is then bleached and dyed, sent to the knitting machine producing cloth tubes, several hundred yards long. Fleece is made by taking this cloth through a ‘napper’ which raises the surface and the resulting fibres are cut by a shearing machine making a textured pile surface or fleece. At this point the fleece is cut into lengths and wound into bolts. Recycle2shop buys these bolts and makes them into picnic rugs and baby mats.