Unifi Converts Billions of PET Bottles into Plastic Yarns

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster): Greensboro, North Carolina- based Unifi has been successful in transforming billions of polyethylene (PET) bottles into plastic yarns. The ‘Repreve’ line of fibres produced by the company has resulted in many leading brands turning to recycled content in their products. Incidentally, nearly 35 billion plastic bottles are discarded in the U.S. every year.

As a first step, the collected PET bottles are cleaned thoroughly. They are then chopped and sent through a dryer to get rid of any moisture content. After this they are melted and reformulated as recycled chips. These chips pass through a proprietary extrusion and texturing process to produce Repreve recycled fibre, which at this stage of development happens to be stiff. This fibre is moved around on heated rollers in order to give it more flexibility.

The company had recently entered into a partnership with tech supplier Oerlikon in designing a machine to produce high-quality yarn from a broad range of products. The pilot machine has been running at Unifi’s headquarters since last summer. It hopes to ramp up the recycling technology, so as to help it reach the goal of recycling 30 billion plastic bottles into yarn by 2030.

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