This amount of bottle waste shows the market demand from the beverage sector is still not good enough for it to invest in and to help develop large scale collection infrastructures in some key regions. Waste volumes are also exacerbated by a lack incentives for consumers to return PET bottles, something beyond the control of beverage firms. But interestingly, in the US state of Georgia, the home of Coca-Cola HQ, PET collection rates stood at just 9% in 2021, according to the figures from Ball Corporation, yet the average PET recycling rate across the USA was estimated at 29% in 2021 by the National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR). This figure was boosted by states such as California, which charges consumers deposit fees on bottles and offers redemptions if they return them to store.
With these low recycling rates, this commodity becomes more expensive but has not deterred US textile fibre recyclers who remain in the hunt for these raw materials. For example, in 2021, the US rPET textile fibre industry faced higher prices and more competition for clear rPET (from the beverage sector), but still achieved a total rPET fibre production of over 1 billion pounds by sourcing greater volumes of coloured rPET flake (57%) and greater volumes of post-industrial rPET flake (11%) compared to 2019, according to NAPCOR.
European recycling rates
Meanwhile in Europe, which has much better collection rates, still not all of the collected plastic bottles go back into rPET bottles. Zero Waste Europe – an initiative supported by the LIFE Programme of the European Union – says that “in 2021, of the 1.8 million tonnes of recycled PET flake output from bottles in Europe, only 31% was made into pellets for new bottles, while 69% goes into other PET products. In addition, new PET bottles placed on the European market contained an average of just 17% rPET, despite a recycling rate of around 50%.”
There’s an economic price point beyond which bottlers will not pay for rPET
Much of this is down to commercial reasons. As Unifi’s Ingle explains, “There’s an economic price point beyond which the bottlers will not pay for rPET. When bottles are used in stable (polyester) fibre, you can go from PET flake directly to stable fibre. But when plastic bottles are used to go back into new rPET bottles, the process goes from collected bottles through to extrusion, then SSP (solid state polymerisation) and finally into new bottles.”
This means there’s additional cost and production steps for bottlers using recycled bottles that a rPET polyester stable fibre producer simply doesn’t have.
“If PET goes above a certain price point, and if rPET goes above a certain high point relative to virgin PET, it stops this (bottle-to-bottle) conversion process,” he said.
It appears then, that supply chain economics provide a very good reason to continue using plastic bottles to make recycled polyester fibre – especially in the short to medium term. It’s obvious there are still serious economic constraints attached to closing the plastic bottle loop, but the infrastructure and incentives to collect the estimated 500 billion plastic bottles used worldwide each year are simply not in place – despite impending regulations coming on stream such as SB-707 (see page: 28) and similar EU edicts.
Microplastic pollution
Yet with the emerging, if poorly understood, issue of plastic pollution related to synthetic (and non-synthetic) textile microfibres it’s easy to understand why there’s a call to move away from bottle-to-fibre in favour of bottle-to-bottle and textile-to-textile polyester yarns – especially considering the huge volumes of polymer capacity predicted to come on stream in China.
Most recently, a study from Cotton Inc., published earlier this year in Nature Communications, estimates that the apparel industry ‘generated 8.3 million tons of plastic pollution in 2019, corresponding to 14% of the estimated 60 million tons of plastic waste from all sectors’.
It’s against the background of such new studies that it’s important to not only minimise the amount of new petroleum-based raw materials the textile sector uses, but it’s imperative there are also incentives to divert synthetics from landfill. Possibly even penalties.
Firstly though, the development of a robust and reliable collection infrastructure together with consumer education and behaviour remains vitally important. So, for example, if there was a ‘national bottle bill’ in the USA, then the quality and the quantity of the material available for PET recycling would increase substantially.
For now, bottle-to-textile fibre recycling is part of this whole, extremely nuanced solution
It already works in European countries such as Germany which has very high recycling rates. “Around 94% of all PET beverage bottles are recycled in Germany and for deposit bottles made of PET, the recycling rate is even higher at 97.5%”, said a 2019 study from German packaging research authority GVM.
For now, bottle-to-textile fibre recycling is part of this whole, extremely nuanced solution to divert plastic waste away from incineration and landfill. With regulation on the horizon, it’s no surprise – and significant – that synthetic yarn suppliers such as Unifi are moving into large-scale textile-to-textile polyester filaments, but it should also be remembered why plastic bottled beverages – and in particular bottled water – is so popular in the first place.
Indonesia ranks as a major consumer of bottled water and is also a huge source of plastic waste. The country was ranked 3rd behind only the USA and China in terms of total bottled water consumption and sales by value in 2021, according to a study by the United Nations (UNWEH).
The reason?
Poor drinking water quality, which is linked to very poor health outcomes. And unless drinking water radically improves in impoverished regions of the world, then the future market for PET beverage bottles looks rosy – even if that means more plastic waste in these regions.
That’s why, for the foreseeable future, all plastics needs to be recycled and recyclable, and because PET is the most recyclable of all plastics, the markets, technology, and collection infrastructure for our sector should be expanded to do this. Not wound down any time soon to achieve an unlikely closed loop system.
This approach also gives existing market innovators such as Unifi a more solid basis upon which to tweak proven recycling technology to give scalable, market drop-in solutions – rather than trying to re-invent the wheel. So while new approaches to plastic pollution from textiles must be encouraged and well-funded – brands should also support solutions that are readily available today if they don’t want to delay a holistic response to ease the planetary burden of global plastic pollution.
