What Happens to a Bottle That Becomes Fabric
Recycled polyester starts as collected PET bottles, not as fabric waste. The bottles are sorted by colour, washed, shredded into flakes, melted, and extruded into filament that is spun into yarn. Chemically the result is close to virgin polyester, and it takes roughly ten bottles to make one T-shirt.
The awkward part of the topic sits in that first sentence. A garment sold as recycled is usually made from the drinks industry's waste rather than from clothing, which means textile-to-textile circularity is not what is happening, and the bottle has been diverted from a system that already recycled it repeatedly. Excluded on purpose is any brand's specific claim: naming companies or reproducing marketing language turns a materials lesson into an accusation the institution then has to defend.
The workflow runs across eight scenes: two on collection and sorting, two on washing, shredding, and melting, one on extrusion and spinning, one on how the fibre compares with virgin polyester, one on the bottle-to-textile problem, and one on where chemical recycling and textile-to-textile routes stand.
