Fashion Saves The Day By Using Recycled Plastic

Fashion industry is plays a big part in environmental pollution. Coloring of textile, mass production, transport of goods, a lot of waste in production. Knowing these facts designer Mara Hoffman had a hard time working in this industry until she started using recycled bottles for textile of her swimsuits!

“Around four years ago, we as a company were on this trajectory of manufacturing more and more, and I just had a little bit of a breakdown about that–I didn’t want to keep doing this unless we could find a way to change every aspect of what we were doing,” says designer Mara Hoffman, one of the major players in the fashion industry who has begun integrating recycled plastic bottles into her fabrics.

As a swimwear designer, Hoffman was especially concerned about the environmental impacts of the nylon and polyester. These two synthetic materials are both resource-intensive to produce, and difficult or impossible to recycle. A few years before Hoffman’s crisis of conscience, though, the materials company Unifi developed Repreve, a fiber made from upcycled plastic bottles. Hoffman began to work Repreve into her swimwear, joining brands like Patagonia and Quicksilver that had already begun to use the high-performing and sustainable material in their athletic wear.

When Hoffman began to make swimwear from Repreve in 2017, it was still fairly cutting edge and obscure. Now clothing made from recycled plastic bottles is trendy, if not mainstream.

Repreve sources its bottles from recycling companies around the U.S. To date, over 14 billion bottles have been recycled into Repreve threads; the company is on track to meet its goal of repurposing 20 billion by 2020. Sahi notes that a major benefit of the Repreve process is the energy saved by recycling rather than manufacturing the materials: Repreve estimates that its method has conserved enough energy to power over 95,000 homes for a year!

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