It's in an The overnight flight from New York to Frankfurt, Germany, and the accoutrements provided to me in the business class had sustainable sheen. Both the polyester blanket and polyester flight kit are proudly claiming they are made of cloth from recycled plastic bottles.
But United Airlines does not know that recycled bottles are So yesterday a green material? No, the newly hot and hyped technology is recycling Polyester in polyester. And I'm on my way to observe the most efficient capital change in this burgeoning field, a chemical recycling process by a new start, Reju.
One half-hour outside the town of Frankfurt in an industrial park drab is the temporary Reju office and three half-built buildings that will serve as industrial operations. In the middle will be r & d and education, on the right is the ofThe polymerization plant, and to the left is the Repolymerization plant.
PlasticIncluding polyester, is formed by taking individual chemicals called monomers and forming chains to create polymers. Importantly, the reju process destroys polyester down to the constituents of the chemical (depolymerization) then returns it to a chain again (replymerization).
I fit into a hard hat, vest, safety glasses, and sneakers, along with half a dozen other journalists and influencers to see inside the depolymerization plant, where magic occurs. . Leading the four -story building. Men in jeans and high-visibility vests roam the plant, casual tinkering along the settings in different pieces of machinery, which calls German to each other.
As I have reported before, the fashion industry are not satisfied Includes the current polyester recycling paradigm. 0.3 percent of the materials used in fashion comes from recycled resourcesAnd there, it's almost all bottles of water.
You see, the polyester is exactly the same as the pet plastic used in water bottles, in another shape (threads instead of a bottle). The mechanical recycling of the pet-which determines it and is re-extruding it-is imperfect, as the process slows down the quality of the plastic, making it less pliable and high performance. It also requires a pure, undyed pet, with a clear plastic bottle of paragon. And polyester fabrics are never pure polyester.
The most common mix of materials you will find in old clothing is 70 percent polyester, 30 percent cotton. “But when you go to details, really 60 percent pets, 5 percent dye, 2 percent elastane, probably contains a little nylon. Who knows?” Says Antoni Mairata, the chief technology official in Reju , as he prepared us to walk in the factory.
My previous reporting has shown that Polyester can also contain plasticizers such as BPA, metals such as antimony, toxic PfasAnd even more so -in -the -least contaminants it took as it moved around the world through factories, warehouses, and container ships. This is why we feed millions of clear, grade water bottles in recycling plants, while dumping old polyester clothing in landfills.
