I am on a The New York Night Flight in Frankfurt, Germany, and the accessories that have been given to me in business class have a lasting sparkle. The polyester cover and the polyester flight kit proudly claim that they are made of tissues turned from recycled plastic bottles.
But united Airlines does he not know that recycled bottles are SO The green equipment of yesterday? No, the new hot and breathtaking technology is recycling polyester in polyester. And I am about to observe the most well capitalized innovation in this booming field, a process of chemical recycling of a new startup, Refine.
Only half an hour outside the city center of Francfurt in a Terne industrial park is the temporary office of Reju and three half built buildings that will serve as industrial operations. In the middle will be R&D and education, on the right ofpolymerization factory, and on the left will be the concerningPolymerization plant.
Plastics, including polyester, are formed by taking individual chemicals called monomers and forming them in chains to create polymers. Essentially, the REJU process decomposes polyester into its constitutive chemicals (depolymerization) and then puts it back in a chain (repolymerization).
I associate myself in a helmet, a vest, security glasses and sneakers, as well as half a dozen other journalists and influencers to see inside the depolymerization plant, where magic occurs . (Rejuly hosted me during this trip and covered my travel costs.) Snake silver pipes everywhere in small silos, and from our point of view on the ground floor, we can look through the metal grids And through the guts of the panels and ducts to the top of the four -story building. John’s men and high -visibility vests wander in the plant, casually with the parameters of various pieces of machines, namely to each other.
As I have already reported, the fashion industry is not satisfied with the current polyester recycling paradigm. Only 0.3% of the materials used in fashion come from recycled sourcesAnd that are almost all the water bottles.
You see, the polyester is exactly the same as the pet plastic used in the water bottles, just in a different shape (wires instead of a bottle). Mechanically recycling pets – lowering it and re -determining it – is not ideal, because the process degrades the quality of the plastic, making it less flexible and high performance. It also requires a pure and not dyed pet, the transparent plastic bottle being the paragon. And polyester textiles are never pure polyester.
The most common mixture of materials you will find in old clothes is 70% polyester, 30% cotton. “But when you come into detail, it’s actually 60% PET, 5% of dyes, 2% of elastane, may be a little nylon. Who knows? “Said Antoni Mairata, Director of Reju technology, while preparing us to travel the factory.
My previous reports have shown that polyester can also contain plasticizers such as BPA, metals such as antimony, toxic APFs and more undesirable contaminants that he picked up when he moved around the world through factories, warehouses and container ships. This is why we nourish millions of clear water bottles of food quality in recycling plants, while pouring old polyester clothes in discharges.
