How 1.5 Million Plastic Bottles Are Turned Into Clothing Every Day | World Wide Waste

these filaments used to be plastic bottles and they're being turned into polyester the fabric makes up more than half of all of our clothing and one company in India called Shri ringa can turn about 1 and A2 million plastic bottles into polyester in a single day that is going to be almost more than tripled in the next couple of years turns out there's plenty of appetite for it more and more fashion brands like Adidas Nike and Shen are trying to increase the amount of polyester made from recycled Plastics in their lines often marketing them as

more sustainable but why is so much of what we wear made from plastic to begin with and how do you turn a bottle into clothing the Shri ranga company spends about 25 metric tons of polyester on a daily basis the founder K sunar is proud of every filament his Factory spins but it took him Decades of trying to get here I felt like doing something to the society by doing recycling today he runs the business alongside his son ctio who quit his job in it to help his dad I wanted to be an entrepreneur and

I wanted to be an entrepreneur in India globally we produce about 600 million of these bottles every year and most of them are not recycled in India waste Pickers collect and deposit them at sorting sites like this one where workers crush and bail them for sale every month Shri renga buys about 900 metric tons of trash from companies like this one but all it really wants is pet that's short for polyethylene talate one of the most common types of plastic at sh rangas Factory the first step to getting it is separating the valuable bottles from

the Caps labels and glue mixing in other Plastics could ruin the final material but getting to Pure pet is pretty timec consuming we have a lot of advanced sensing Technologies which are used to separate pet PVC all the other Plastics bottle caps are usually made from polypropylene a kind of plastic that Shri renga doesn't recycle so they sell them to another company that makes lead acid battery cases and all of the dirt and sand they collect from washing the bottles is pressed with Ash to make bricks that decorate the factory [Music] floor then machines crush

the bottles into flakes the bagged flakes are then loaded onto trucks and delivered to another part of the factory [Music] here they are crushed again and passed over a Civ Shaker a machine that sorts the flakes by size making sure they're no larger than 14 mm smaller particles falling to the Shaker's bottom are used again to make pet pellets but the flakes still aren't 100% separated after a quick rinse Ma transfer them into a float tank here the pet will sink and other Plastics can be skimmed off the top they are then washed 10 times

to remove any remaining dirt and glue nothing is wasted in this vect that water is again used back the plastic is rinsed one final time leaving behind clear flakes which are dried and loaded into these sacks now it's time to turn them into fiber and pet is uniquely Suited for this purpose it has long chains of molecules that hold tightly together creating lightweight flexible and strong materials the length of those molecular chains determines whether the plastic is used for things like bottles packaging or textiles chemically pet and polyester are the same thing making fibers starts

by melting the plastic Flakes with colored pigments a technique known as dope so dying the combined goop is then pushed through a spinnerette a metal plate with hundreds of small holes that can be adjusted for thickness when it melts and comes out it comes in the colored form we don't use a single drop of water we don't use energy for our coloring process Shri renga currently makes 200 different colors of fiber as they exit the filament's cool and dry after every use the plates are cleaned using high frequency sound waves which create microscopic bubbles that

collapse and remove anything stuck to the spinner in the fibers are then stretched using a series of rollers which deposit them into these large buckets shutting down and restarting these machines is energy intensive and expensive so they have to run non-stop throughout the day if you have to stop then it takes a long time for us to reboot again workers weigh the drums and bring them into this area called the draw [Music] line here 60 to 70 barrels are simultaneously routed through a series of eyelets pulling them into parallel [Music] strips polyester tends to hold

static electricity so the fibers are dipped in a starch-based lubricant to avoid sticking together another series of rollers makes them up to four times longer and yet another set of heated rollers stabilizes the fiber into its stretched State this machine crims the fibers giving them a wavy pattern and making them easier to combine with other textiles like [Music] cotton the finished fibers travel to the top of this platform where they are cut down to a manageable size finally they are compressed bailed and shipped to another company for further processing at Shri kanatal Mills the fibers

are spun into Yarns using a series of machines first workers load them into a bail opener which uses rollers and spiked drums to loosen the fiber they weigh the sheet before loading it into a cting machine it pulls the fiber over wire covered cylinders that comb through Tangles creating a thin web that is then condensed into a loose rope called sver these sver strands are coiled into large cans workers attach them to machines that combine several of the ropes together [Music] next the sers are run through something called a Simplex machine it uses a series

of rollers rotating at different speeds to stretch the fibers and make them more parallel the result is a more Compact and uniform rope known as roving which is ideal for [Music] spinning workers feed the roving through a spinner that twists it into yarn finally the strands a ring spun on top [Music] bobbins Cil and his father used these cones to make their clothing but before pet was ever woven into t-shirts it started out as a lab experiment when scientists at the chemical company Dupont developed the first synthetic fibers in the early 20th century they were

celebrated as major scientific achievements that could replace silk and cotton modern Fabrics of today are all chemistry and a yard wide Before the Breakthrough the US imported over 90% of its silk from Japan using it mostly to make stockings but all trades ceased during World War II collapsing the silk market after the war nylon stockings became a cheap popular substitute free nylons just for the scramble and in the 1950s polyester was built as a magical man-made fabric that wouldn't wrinkle for A New Concept in fashion clothes that pack well and need little care in the

1970s it became cheaper than cotton and fashion brands embraced it the material was strong flexible easy to die resistant to heat and stains and quick to dry in the 1980s cotton was the world's most popular fiber but over the next few decades polyester came to dominate the industry and is expected to keep growing with the majority of production outsourced to Southeast Asia the popularity was fueled by fast fashion brands like Gap H&M Zara and Forever 21 in 2020 the World produced enough polyester to fill about 2 and2 million garbage trucks less than 15% of that

came from recycled material and one study showed that a single truckloads worth of clothing goes into a landfill or incinerator every second to bring that stat down more and more brands are working with recycled polyester made from plastic bottles including Adidas Nike Zara and even Sheen in early 2024 more than 120 clothing companies pledged to increase their use of recycled polyester Shri renga launched its own recycled clothing brand in 2021 called eoline most pieces are made of 100% recycled polyester but sometimes they're mixed with cotton so once the fiber was made making Yarns and fabrics

and garments was just an extension everything is still made in the same facilities workers connect hundreds of bobbins to a machine that weaves the yarn into sheets of fabric which then head to inspection if there is some defect that is found it will be marked with a marker and once that marker is seen in the cutting section they will cut that portion alone and keep it aside as waste that again gets recycled all of the Fabrics they use are laid out marked and cut into various shapes for garments to add a design Shri ringa uses

a sublimation printer and once this uh the sheets are out we place them into panels in our Heat Transfer Machine this device applies heat and pressure to transfer dieses directly onto the polyester the company sells 400,000 garments a year and plans to Triple production by 2026 we are bold betting on this expanding our capacities thinking that the future is going to be sustainable fashion and we want to be well placed when that wave comes in 2023 the family received a huge Boost after India's prime minister Narendra Modi wore one of their vests known as a

surgery I was literally in tears my product is own by prime minister of the country something wonderful it's something to convince someone to wear something out of trash and that we've been able to do with clothes made from recycled polyester are often advertised as good for the environment but they still come with an impact washing any synthetic fiber can introduce microplastics less than 5 mm in length into our waterways some studies suggests that synthetic fibers contribute more than a third of all microplastics in the ocean and if it ends up in a landfill River or

ocean it won't break down to top it off recycling polyester isn't as easy as recycling a plastic bottle polyester is often mixed with things like cotton spandex chemicals and dyes that must be separated before recycling the cheapest and simplest method for recycling clothing involves shredding it but that creates shorter fibers that need to be blended with the Virgin ones to make new clothes so they are typically downcycled into carpets and stuffing for insulation in 2020 a research institute in Hong Kong started experimenting with fibert fiber recycling it partnered with H&M to make this machine which

turns used clothes into new ones in about 3 days first a technician like Emily sha examines the Garment so today we will recycle a old G this ozone chamber sanitizes the fabric in about an hour then Emily removes the buttons labels and zippers and cuts the Garment so the fabric is easy to work with the shredder strips the bits of cloth down further and then I will take off the open Fabrics but this part of the process does require some new materials so we going add some virin fibers into the Yarns to make it the

stronger another machine mixes that cotton with a recycled skirt Emily then rolls the mixed fibers into clumps and feed them into a machine that turns them into what's called a fiber web the fiberweb gets bundled into these snake-like sers the sers are then spun into ply yarn the building blocks for any new garment finally a machine knits a new sweater based on a computer design Shoppers pay about $65 to recycle clothing here how do we help consumers think about their clothes differently well that's one of the reasons why we have a glass box doing research

in a shopping mall the H&M Foundation partnered with the Hong Kong Research Institute of textiles and apparel that investment allowed the company to license and install the technology at one of its stores in Stockholm where the company's headquartered H&M calls it the loop here Shoppers pay only $18 to see the recycling process in action that's about the price of a new pair of the brand sweatpants that's how it comes out and then this is the only part that has to be removed Virginia the technician trims the extra yarn and the Garment is ready to go

it seems like a perfect solution but it takes 3 days to recycle just one garment a factory like this that can recycle thousands of tons of clothes a day doesn't exist yet but H&M says that eventually this kind of Technology could be a global solution for textile waste the O Grail is a garment to garment Recycling and that that's for me where today most of investment going into and other large companies are making similar bets Gap and Zara's parent company inditex recently made major investments in an American Business called Amber cycle the company developed a

chemical process to separate poly G from dyes and other Fabrics eliminating the need for Virgin materials the idea for Amber cycle is really just how do you take an old t-shirt and turn it into a new t-shirt instead of using natural resources the most difficult thing is scaling up the process from Pilot PL scale to tens of thousands of t-shirts that successive scale up is really hard it's especially hard when Virgin polyester is so much cheaper and easier to use than New Recycling technology less than 1% of old clothes are recycled to new clothes so

we don't actually have large or I would say commercial scale technology for recycling meanwhile fast fashion shows no signs of slowing down and its expected synthetic fibers could make up nearly 34s of all textile production by 2030 brands in the industry wider needs to invest more into fiber to fiber recycling but at the same time we need to realize that this is not a silver bullet you know recycled polyester generates about 70% less emissions than virgin and Shri ranga has several certifications ensuring it limits the use of harmful chemicals and actually recycles the trash it

buys from the end product you can trace everything back to the origin and we wanted that to be the core ethos of our brand and we positioned it that way some Advocates say it's better to just recycle bottles into new bottles since that can be done around 11 times but less than 10% of all plastic actually makes it to a recycling center so for now Cil and his dad are happy to save any plastic they can from landfills or the oceans even if it's only temporary for us when you make it into a garment it

takes a longer time for it to reach the dust bin though there's a lot of work to be done he thinks Shri ranga is well positioned to make the most out of plastic trash whether it's recycling or renewable energy this is the year of sustainability and uh I think we're in the right space [Music]