ReadyMade Magazine - August/September 2008

How one manufacturer transforms plastic bottles into fabric
FACTORY SPECIAL
With all the controversy surrounding
plastic bottles these days—Should we
ban them? Are they polluting our bodies
with bisphenol A?—we may have missed
one point. It turns out that something
useful and functional can be remade from
the 51 billion receptacles that invade
the landfill each year: fabric. In fact, your
fleece hoodie might very well be made
out of Eco-fi, a fiber derived from 100
percent recycled plastic bottles.
Eco-fi, which supplies Michael’s,
Jo-Ann Fabrics, and Wal-Mart with
fibers, has other applications as well:
the fuzzy material is used in those giant
flaps at the car wash, and felt in the
craft aisle. All that stuff and more was
once plain old plastic bottles, which
turn out to contain some of the best
polyester resin around. Intrigued by how
the process works, we toured the Foss
Manufacturing plant in Hampton, New
Hampshire, where 350 million bottles
are converted each year. Here’s how a
soda container becomes a textile.

PHOTOGRAPH Y BY MOMO SHINZAWA

1The first step in the process is bottle collection, which takes
place in upstate New York and Canada. An off-site chipper
grates the bottles down to “bottle flake,” which the folks at Foss
equate to Sno-Cone shaved ice. The flake is then transported to
the 528,000-square-foot New England plant. Once it arrives,
BY LISA SELIN DAVIS
the dried flake is melted in giant vats called extruders.
2In liquid form, the plastic is pumped through
spinarettes and cooled to form fiber filaments.
The fibers feel eerily like human hair gone un-
washed for so long that it’s soft with grease.