Recycled Polyester, also known as rPET, is created by melting recycled plastic and re-spinning it into a new polyester fiber. It is said that five soda bottles are enough to create one extra large t-shirt. Nearly half of the world's clothing is made of polyster and the numbers seem to increase. Customers seek traditional polyester's stretchy and resilient texture. However, polyester shed microfibers and are not biodegradable, taking hundreds of years to biodegrade. At Lafy, we made it a mission to only use recycled polyester.
Recycled Polyester provides a second life to materials that are not biodegradable and would end up in the landfill or the ocean. With over 8 million tons of plastic entering the ocean every year and 150 million tons of plastic currently in the marine eco-system, scientists predict that there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. Furthermore, plastic has been found in 60 percent of all seabirds and 100 percent of all seaturtles.
In terms of quality, virgin polyester and recycled polyester are almost the same, yet the latter requiring 59 percent less energy to produce. According to lifecycle assessments, recycled polyester's production process reduces CO2 emission by 32 percent in comparison to virgin polyester.
Despite being made of plastic, recycled polyester is just as soft and resillient as virgin polyester.
