Wearing green or plastic or …
As I said yesterday, I’m going to try a new approach to my blog by writing on a different topic each day of the week. Wednesday I’m going to focus on sustainability and am toying with Wednesdays are for the World. I know it’s corny but I couldn’t find a good W word for Wednesday. Today I decided to look at a new trend in clothes regarding sustainability, especially on a concept of clothing made from recycled plastic. Yes, I’m talking about those recycled water and soda bottles. It’s possible and can help drive an important factor in the sustainability equation. So what does the market look like for sustainable clothes and how can we improve the situation?
One of the big problems in recycling is making sure there’s a demand for the product once it’s been recycled. It’s not enough to collect those bottles, cans, paper and glass to recycle if there’s nothing on the other end waiting for the recycled product. If no demand exists guess where that product ends up at. You got it. Back in the landfill. Something has to be done with it. You can’t store it hoping for something to happen. There’s more product coming down the line that will end up in the same situation.
Aluminum is the furthest along in this process with almost all aluminum now being turned back into product through recycling programs. In fact, there is such a demand for aluminum that recycling cans can provide a good source of fundraising revenue for non-profit groups. In fact the price for recycled aluminum is pretty decent per pound. This market will continue to expand and other types of metals will fall in the same arena. Copper is probably the most lucrative and has resulted in criminal activity to recover copper.
Of the other commodity recycled products paper is starting to develop into a more expansive market with more and more paper products being repulped and turned back into paper, albeit in a different grade. With companies like GreenLine Paper offering different paper products from recycled paper hopefully the market will continue to grow and reduce the number of trees being consumed as well as reduce the amount of paper ending up in landfills. These days you can more easily find paper products such as paper towels and toilet tissue made from post-consumer recycled paper. A demand is developing.
But what about plastic? That market is one that needs to continue to develop. One of the problems with plastic is that it is difficult to recycle the product to something that will hold product for human consumption such as sodas or water. As you can see from this presentation there are a number of issues before a product can be certified by the FDA as food-contact compliant. This makes the market for plastics a narrower market and can create challenges when recycling plastic.
Fortunately work is being done to help make plastics FDA compliant for food products. This work will help broaden the market but it may take a while for the processes to become more economically feasible. In the interim other sources need to be found for plastics. Probably the most creative I’ve found recently has been to recycle the PET plastic into textile fiber such as polyester thread for clothing. By doing so and blending this thread with cotton or other natural fabrics you can start to create sustainable clothing.
Clothing companies such as A Lot to Say and Anvil Knitwear are creating clothing made from 50% PET fiber and 50% cotton. They offer a pretty broad line of clothing and can help start to change the market for PET plastics that have been recycled. I’ve ordered a couple of t-shirts to try them out to see how comfortable they feel and well they hold up. If they turn out to be acceptable it looks like it’ll be time to change my wardrobe to one that is more sustainable in our environment today.
look at stock symbol AERT, they just opened a plant on oklahoma to recapture used plastic, they add wood fibor and make out door decking lumber, it also lowers the number of trees needing to be cut for lumber.
For a material as ubiquitous as it is, plastic is starting to earn a reputation as an extremely environmentally unfriendly material. Plastic leaches endocrine disruptors such as phthalates, hormone mimickers like bisphenol A, or toxic stuff like antimony. Plastic also doesn’t disappear or biodegrade – every molecule of plastic ever created except for the plastic that has been burned still exists. Plastic bags floating in the ocean choke turtles who mistake them for jellyfish. Plastic beads are found in fish who mistake them for fish eggs or plankton. NOAA uses satellites to detect unattended mile-wide plastic drift nets killing tons of fish.
Since plastic cannot be sterilized by heating it, it has to be shredded and combined with other materials to be reused. This often means that more fresh plastic is used to join recycled plastic material that would be used to make a new object.
Assuming that a recycled plastic shirt is safe to wear, sweat in or wear out may not be a great decision. With plastic there is no “other place”. Something to think about when you buy a plastic item wrapped in plastic packaging and carry it to the car in a plastic bag.
I visited P’Lovers across from the Quarry for some gifts and they have some great sustainable clothing and household items. We’re the only location outside of Canada.
http://www.plovers.us.