I’m on an in a single day flight from New York to Frankfurt, Germany, and the accoutrements given to me in enterprise class have a sustainable sheen. Each the polyester blanket and polyester flight equipment proudly declare they’re made of material spun from recycled plastic bottles.
However doesn’t United Airways know that recycled bottles are so yesterday’s inexperienced materials? No, the brand new scorching and hyped know-how is recycling polyester into polyester. And I’m on my strategy to observe essentially the most well-capitalized innovation on this burgeoning area, a chemical recycling course of by a brand new startup, Reju.
Solely a half hour outdoors downtown Frankfurt at a colorless industrial park are Reju’s momentary workplace and three half-constructed buildings that may function its industrial operations. Within the center will probably be R&D and schooling, to the correct is the depolymerization plant, and to the left would be the repolymerization plant.
Plastics, together with polyester, are shaped by taking particular person chemical substances known as monomers and forming them into chains to create polymers. Primarily, Reju’s course of breaks the polyester down into its constituent chemical substances (depolymerization) then places it again collectively in a series once more (repolymerization).
I swimsuit up in a tough hat, vest, security glasses, and sneakers, together with a half dozen different journalists and influencers to see contained in the depolymerization plant, the place the magic occurs. (Reju hosted me on this journey and lined my journey prices.) Silver pipes snake in every single place into small silos, and from our vantage level on the bottom ground, we will search for by the metallic grates and thru the center of panels and ducts to the highest of the four-story constructing. Males in denims and high-visibility vests wander the plant, casually tinkering with the settings on numerous items of equipment, calling in German to one another.
As I’ve reported earlier than, the style trade is dissatisfied with the present polyester recycling paradigm. Simply 0.3 % of supplies utilized in vogue are from recycled sources, and of that, it is just about all water bottles.
You see, polyester is the very same as PET plastic utilized in water bottles, simply in a special form (threads as a substitute of a bottle). Mechanically recycling PET—melting it down and re-extruding it—isn’t ideally suited, as a result of the method degrades the standard of the plastic, making it much less pliable and high-performance. It additionally requires pure, undyed PET, with the clear plastic bottle being the paragon. And polyester textiles are by no means pure polyester.
The commonest mixture of supplies you’ll discover in outdated clothes is 70 % polyester, 30 % cotton. “However if you go into the main points, it’s really 60 % PET, 5 % dyes, 2 % elastane, possibly incorporates a bit of little bit of nylon. Who is aware of?“ says Antoni Mairata, the chief know-how officer at Reju, as he prepares us to stroll by the manufacturing facility.
My earlier reporting has proven that polyester may comprise plasticizers like BPA, metals corresponding to antimony, poisonous PFAS, and extra undesirable contaminants it picked up because it moved the world over by factories, warehouses, and container ships. Because of this we feed tens of millions of clear, food-grade water bottles into recycling vegetation, whereas dumping outdated polyester clothes into landfills.
