The Cutting Edge / COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : A New Idea in Trashy Clothes : Textile Mills Are Recycling Garbage Into Quality Fabrics

Ever seen the latest haute couture designs on fashion runways and thought, “That’s garbage?”

If the answer is “yes,” you may be more right than you think.

With the help of new technology, textile mills are collecting plastic drinking bottles, used clothing, cotton and wool scraps and other so-called garbage and turning them into first-quality fabrics used in brand-name T-shirts, jackets and backpacks.

“We’ve used ordinary garbage to make an extraordinary product,” said Karen Deniz, merchandising director of Dyersburg Fabrics, a textile manufacturer that makes fleece out of old bottles. “We can’t burn plastic soda bottles, we can’t bury them and we can’t sink them, so it’s time we start wearing them.”

Clothing made from recycled bottles started hitting stores about 18 months ago. So far the bottles have typically gone into fleece, fake fur and other fluffy fabrics, accounting for between 50% and 89% of the fabrics’ content. Fleece jackets made entirely from melted-down bottles will begin appearing on clothing racks for the first time this fall.

The bottles are made from polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, the same petroleum-based substance that is used to make polyester fibers. The synthetic fibers make fabrics very strong, resistant to fading and wrinkling and able to stand up to moths in the attic.

Traditionally, polyester fibers are made by forcing the PET resin through tiny holes to produce hair-like strands, which are then stretched and crimped to make them strong. In the textile mill, machines then align the fibers and twist them together to make a yarn or thread that can be knitted or woven into fabric, said Albert Fowlkes, Dyersburg’s vice president of operations in Dyersburg, Tenn.

To make bottles, the PET resin is molded into sheet or tubes, then finished off with plastic caps and metal rings. To turn the used bottles in fibers, the bottles are sorted and then processed by a machine that strips away paper labels, metal and caps. What is left is then cleaned, purified and smashed into tiny flakes. Once the flakes are melted back down into a resin-like substance, the process of turning them into hair-thin fibers is basically the same as for making virgin polyester.

When the recycled fibers get to textile mills such as Dyersburg, they are treated slightly differently than first-time fibers. For example, the weaving machines must be set to run more slowly, and it takes more energy to fluff up the fleece fabric, Fowlkes said. The dye formulation is also adjusted for the recycled fibers because they absorb color differently, he added.

Wellman Inc., a leading producer of synthetic fibers, began recycling plastic bottles at its South Carolina plant in 1980. For more than a decade, the quality was good enough only to line the vents of filtration systems, roadbeds and landfills, said Judith Langan, a marketing director in Wellman’s New York-based fibers division. The company began producing apparel-quality fibers in 1992.

The next year, Patagonia, the outdoor clothing firm, unveiled its first fleece pullover jacket made partly from recycled plastic bottles--25 bottles per jacket.

“It was . . . like magic,” Langan said. “To think that one minute this was all these piles of dirty old plastic bottles and now there’s a beautiful jacket--I think that’s what caught people’s attention.”

Richard Mann, marketing director at Draper Knitting, a textile mill in Canton, Mass., says the recycled fibers are more resilient than virgin polyester.

In addition to fleeces, the recycled PET fibers have been used to make woven and knitted polyester fabrics resembling denim, pointelle, broadcloth and jersey blends. Outdoor gear maker JanSport has created a family of canvas-style backpacks and tote bags made from the recycled polyester fibers.

Wellman, one of a handful of companies that make most of the recycled fibers used by American textile mills, estimates that it recycles 2.4-billion drinking bottles into polyester fiber annually, saving enough raw petroleum to power a city the size of Atlanta for a year.