It’s easy to make promises when you have no idea quite how challenging they may be to keep.
And that’s what many brands and retailers have been doing when it comes to recycled polyester — committing to using more of it, promising to prioritize it over virgin fibers, declaring they’ll reach X percent of rPET in their product lines by 2025, 2030, 2050.
While that may all sound great, rPET is in strikingly short supply and apparel players won’t be first in line to snag what’s there.
“We are at a point where we can’t add more end use applications unless we increase supply,” said Darrel Collier, executive director of the National Association for PET Container Resources, or NAPCOR. NAPCOR is the supply chain for PET containers (like plastic bottles), the predominant source for the coveted rPET, and it counts all parties along that supply chain — from bottle converters to Unifi — among its members.
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The problem, primarily, is that, everyone is scrambling for recycled content as awareness of the world’s waste problem ramps up. Beyond that, while over the last 10 years the reclamation capacity for PET (or the amount of PET that can be taken in and recycled to make recycled PET, or rPET), has increased by “just under a billion pounds,” according to Collier, United States’ recycling rate for plastic bottles over that same period has stayed right around 30 percent, meaning the country hasn’t improved its ability to get more than one in three bottles back from consumers to recycle in a decade. In some countries, by comparison, reclamation rates can reach as high as 80 percent or 90 percent.
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Essentially, the U.S. is prepared to recycle far more PET than what it can get its hands on.
These details are directly tied to the ability to deliver on 2030 commitments, making them tied both to ESG scores and investments (read: money) as well as delivering on consumer demands (read: loyal, which, ultimately, also translates to money).
However nuanced, this is a bottom line issue beyond just an environmental one. Especially as scarcity is what sends prices up.
From his vantage point, and if the status quo sustains, Collier said brands “won’t be able to meet their [recycled polyester] commitments.”
“The market is growing. PET is a very versatile product. It has a great life cycle when you look at the LCA, it has a much lower carbon footprint than competitive offerings. It has been a lower price, so it’s very, very efficient,” he said, noting the key reasons brands have been chasing PET for recycled content more than any other waste streams that could yield fiber for textiles. “We are supply limited today. The reclamation investment by the people who are involved in the reclamation capacity has been there, but the problem is they’re not able to invest in something if they don’t feel they have a supply of it.”
What’s more, the scarce supply of rPET means those once lower prices are rising and will continue to do so as competition for that supply heats up.
“We have been going through a couple of year period where rPET prices have been higher than virgin resin prices,” Collier said.
And now that the Cokes and Pepsis of the world also have commitments in place to make more new bottles from recycled bottles, and recycling technologies have improved enough that food-grade containers can be made from recycled content — not to mention that states like California will start requiring 15 percent post-consumer recycled resin in plastic bottles next year, growing that to 50 percent by 2030 — competition is getting stiff.
Fashion is a small, small player in the market for rPET. Collier said roughly 45 percent of available rPET is going to food and beverage containers, 45 percent to fibers and 10 percent to other applications. Of the share that’s going to fibers, the overwhelming majority goes to carpets, making fiber for clothing “quite small,” perhaps even as small as 5 percent of the market. So, when some clout becomes necessary for securing it, fashion isn’t favored to win.
“The brands make big commitments that they’re going to use X percent of bottles, but when I’m using the term ‘commitments’ from the bottlers, yes, they’re making a public announcement but they’re also going to the feedstock suppliers and saying ‘I will buy X number of tons or PET chip from you or bottle flake or whatever it is. They will go in and they will say ‘I’m buying this. I will make a contract commitment for this.’ Not the kind of commitments that the textile companies are making,” explained Karla Magruder, founder of Accelerating Circularity, which has made accelerating textile to textile recycling its mission. “Most brands don’t really even understand everything that bottle has to go through and may not have the relationship with the fiber supplier, never mind the bottle collector, never mind anybody else.”
“If bottles are being absorbed by the bottle guys and they’re willing to pay [the premium], the market will go and sell it that way,” she continued. “If the textile industry doesn’t make the commitments, won’t pay the upcharge, it’s going to be demand that doesn’t get fulfilled.”
Unifi, a fiber innovator that has led the market for rPET in apparel since 2007 with its Repreve polyester made from recycled plastic bottles, has seen recycled content become a “mega trend” in recent years, according to Jay Hertwig, the company’s senior vice president of commercialization.
“There is not a brand out there in the apparel space, in the automotive space, home and commercial furnishings space, and even the industrial space that is not looking for eco-friendly alternatives or eco-friendly products to produce,” he said. And despite what many worried would be a pandemic-prompted slowdown in sustainability commitments, the trend for conversion from virgin polyester to recycled hasn’t waned at all. “I haven’t seen it change any company’s commitments so far….Our Repreve product today represents almost 40 percent of our total sales and we see that potentially growing to 50 percent over the next year or two.”
Because Unifi is vertically integrated and can secure its own bottles, the company hasn’t been challenged by the scarcity of PET for recycling, but one thing Hertwig said, which others on the inside of this rPET conversation agree with, is that the key way forward will be to “go beyond the bottle,” meaning turning more to textiles to recycle polyester or investigating other waste streams the industry may not yet be thinking of.
“We’re going to have to recycle other materials — so we’re going to have to recycle polyester fabrics, we’re going to have to recycle other PET fabrics that we maybe haven’t traditionally thought about or didn’t know there was a waste stream available,” Hertwig said. “I think that will drive us into the future because, ultimately, if it’s going to be about sustainability then there’s a whole lot of other plastics and there’s a whole lot of other PET waste out there, it’s not just bottles. So, if we can go beyond the bottle, I think there’ll be an opportunity to continue to grow.”
The challenges in doing so, however, won’t be few.
For one, advancements still need to be made in recycling technologies. Mechanical recycling, which can shred fabrics and melt and remove plastic fibers like polyester, operates at commercial scale, but that scale still isn’t big enough to meet current demand. And chemical recycling, which uses chemicals to dissolve fibers into solvents and holds the hope for being able to separate cotton out from a poly/cotton blended garment, for example, as Magruder said, “is really still basically at its infancy,” though new innovations are currently “coming online.”
Even less technical than that, advancements still need to be made in getting clothing back from consumers. And without that, big commitments for 2030 recycled content will remain in jeopardy.
“Post-consumer material, when we get it back, we’re getting it back one piece at a time because it’s stuff that people throw into the trash or send to a secondhand store or send to Goodwill or put it in a bin for recycling. The equipment and the technology to be able to identify what’s in that garment doesn’t really exist. So even if these recycling technologies commercialize at the scale that’s going to meet everybody’s commitments, we still have a bunch of other stuff that’s got to get done before we can get them the feedstock that’s going to run their processes,” Magruder said.
“I have a belief that it’s going to be incredibly challenging to meet those commitments because they can’t do it with bottles — nor should they really be doing it with bottles. They should be doing it with textiles.”