Turning waste plastic bottles into clothes

DW (English)

Plastic bottles are found littering India's landscapes far and wide. But the material can be recycled to make threads for clothing — turning plastic waste into fashion highlights.

Transcript

00:00 This machine is blending polyester and cotton threads to form fabric.

00:07 But these polyester threads aren't made directly from petroleum.

00:11 It's sourced from recycled PET bottles.

00:16 PET bottle is an engineering plastics, okay.

00:20 Highly viscoelastic in the sense when you stretch it, I get a fiber.

00:25 PET bottles are there plenty.

00:27 So why not I make a fiber out of PET bottles?

00:30 India alone consumes 1.4 million tons of PET plastic every year.

00:35 Along with it comes a responsibility to handle that plastic waste in an efficient manner.

00:40 Sriranga Polymers located at Karur in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu converts

00:45 PET bottles to apparel.

00:47 It all starts with rag pickers who collect the bottles and give them to an agent.

00:51 The agent converts these bottles into stacked compressed plastics which arrive at this crushing

00:56 facility.

01:02 Every month they crush 800 tons of PET plastic.

01:06 These PET bottles go through various stages of sorting where PET bottles are separated

01:11 from bottle caps, paper and other materials.

01:14 These are then shredded to obtain these tiny plastic pieces called recycled PET flakes.

01:24 These flakes are washed with caustic soda, rinsed and dried to remove dirt, silt and

01:30 other materials.

01:31 Nearly 98% of all water used in this process is purified, recycled and reused.

01:39 The next step is to melt these hot washed flakes and convert them to polyester fibers

01:44 according to customer requirements.

01:47 Production of polyester fiber is done by a technology called dope dyed technology.

01:53 The advantage is that we do not use a single drop of water in coloring the polyester fiber.

02:02 To dye one kilo of fabric you need 4 or 5 times the amount of water.

02:08 That will pollute our water, land, everything.

02:11 Whereas in dope dye technology we integrate the color while melting the plastic.

02:18 So when the polymer itself is colored, you do not need further dyeing.

02:23 These fibers are used in the manufacture of automobiles, home furnishing and apparels.

02:29 In dispersed dye the coating on top will fade away with 2 or 3 washes whereas this material

02:34 will not fade as the color is present in the core.

02:39 Finally the polyester fiber is mixed with other materials like cotton to form fabrics

02:44 which are then tailored to make various apparels.

02:48 Ultimately a product which is ranked as super sustainable product.

02:53 It is normally 20% more than the conventional polyester fabric based garments.

02:59 So people who believe in this recycling we give them the traceability information from

03:04 garment to the waste bottle that is being picked up.

03:07 So any consumer who buys our garment there is a QR code which he can scan and he will

03:13 know from where the waste was collected for his particular garment.

03:18 In India the textile industry accounts for nearly 5% of the country's GDP.

03:23 Fortunately the sustainable fashion market in the country is set to grow at 11% and reach

03:28 10 billion US dollars by 2025.

03:31 Customers are willing to pay more because there is a cost associated with that.

03:35 And we are all seeing the effect of climate change.

03:38 So there is a good reception for sustainable clothing amongst customers.

03:43 It's a question of reach.

03:45 We need to reach to them.

03:46 We need to educate them on this and I think we'll be there.

03:52 By using just a portion of that fiber they produce 5000 apparel every month and have

03:57 2300 unique customers.

04:00 On the whole Sriranga polymers use no new petroleum and instead convert 1.5 million

04:07 bottles every day to manufacture polyester.

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