How many plastic bottles can you save?

Plastic pollution is an undeniable problem because this is something we can obviously see and measure. Reducing plastic waste can help lessen trash that goes to landfill, lessen wildlife hazards, especially at sea and reduce the use of limited fossil fuel.

Instead of throwing away PET bottles to landfill, we turn them into something useful - like fabrics!

Let's see how many plastic bottles are used to make one roll of fabric. In a gist, we need to know the weight of the fabric roll and compare it to the weight of the plastic bottles.

We need to consider the type of fabric, since different fabrics have different weights, they also have different percentages of recycled polyester in them. We also need to consider that there are some waste or by products during the recycling process, so it's not a one to one straight forward computation.

With those notes in mind, let's begin computing! Let's use our Recycled Polyester Taffetta 300T as an example.

Given:
Rpet Taffeta 300T is 72 gsm.
1 roll has 150 meters.
Fabric width is 148cm.

Computation:
1. Calculate how many kilograms the fabric weigh per meter: fabric weight in gsm/1000 x width in cm/100 = weight in kg per meter fabric;

72gsm/1000 x 148cm/100 = 0.072 x 1.48 = 0.10656kg

2. Calculate kilos per fabric roll: number of meters per roll x weight in kilos per meter = kg per roll

150m x 0.10656kg = ‭15.8475kg

3. Calculate kilos for yarn (there is about 20% fiber lost in the production):  kilos per roll / 0.8 = kilos used for yarns

‭15.8475‬kg / 0.8 = 19.809375kg

4. Calculate percentage of of recycled polyester used: e.g. for a fabric that is 70% Recycled Polyester 30% Cotton, it will be "kg use for yarns x 0.7" = final kilos used in RPET yarns.

For our example, the fabric is 100% Rpet, so no need to compute.

5. Calculate how many bottled been recycled: final kilos used in REPT yarns / weight of plastic bottles. Average weight of 2 liter soda plastic bottle is 42 grams.

‭19.809375‬kg / (42 grams/1000) = ‭19.809375‬kg / 0.042kg = 471.65 2-liter bottles

Answer:
471.65 2-liter plastic soda bottles are recycled for every roll of Recycled Polyester Taffeta 300T.
In perspective, if you use 1 2-liter bottle in a day, you can accumulate the 471 bottles after 1 year and 3.5 months.

Reducing waste is one of the cornerstone principles of Vivify Textiles. This is one of our contributions to the worldwide pollution problem. We can supply this solution to your brand! Imagine the impact on how much more we can recycle and save if many other brands and manufacturers use sustainable fabrics, we just might be closer to that cleaner and brighter future.