How is polyester made from plastic bottles?
Have you ever wondered what your clothes are made out of? Well if you did here is the answer to your question.Some people (like us)throw their plastic bottles in the dump, well that plastic bottle could possibly end up in your closet, it’s a long and complicated process but here are some steps of turning a plastic bottle into clothing.
The first stage is shredding the plastic bottles so that it will release the small amount of liquid inside the bottles so it doesn’t affect the plastic, The shredded bottle is now wrapped in cellophane and boxed up ready to be shifted to China.
They could be rubbish to us, but to China they are a great valuable price. Sorting separates the clear plastics and the coloured ones, clear plastic can be made in white clothes and materials that can be dyed, so they are very valuable. A lot of them has stickers so they got to go. There´s a separate bath for the stickers and the coloured lids, but the workers has to be careful because itś very dangerous for their skin but very good for the stickers to remove.
What is left now is just a pile of clear plastic shreds, but it´s very wet. The next step is the oven where it's mixed with coloured plastics to produce white cloth, the plastics will then spend 10 hours in the rotated drums slowly drying out, there are other plastics as well in other oven so they have to watch out on them too.
the mixture is then sent through a screw where it´s heated to 270 degrees celsius so that it will mount the plastics. They made threads now but just not strong enough, so they have to stretch it several times while being heated, the next part is to tear it apart again to make polyester, but it takes place to another factory so their gonna bring it up and sent it on.
They now put the thread inside a machine that scrapes it all into a very rough cloth which is loaded ready to be carded, carding helps to strengthen the polyester. When all of that is done all our plastic bottles has finally turned into polyester.
