Plastic Bottle ==>Fabric
There is a company in Hong Kong that shipped 30,000 blankets to Japan in 2011 to help all the people that lost their homes in the tragic earthquake and tsunami that hit the country in 2011. Why and how did they do this? The answer to this question can start in Hong Kong’s North Point Recycling Center. What do you think a plastic bottle can make? Would you ever have expected that you could turn 8 plastic bottles into a sports shirt? That’s exactly what the recycling center does. They collect plastic bottles and turn them into things such as blankets. This not only helps the environment, but also helps the people that lost everything in natural disasters and can’t afford to even buy a blanket!
The method of “plastic transforming” is an exceedingly good way to reuse something that most people only use once or twice, because plastic can take up to one thousand years to biodegrade. Despite this fact, 30 billion plastic bottles end up in landfills in the United States itself!
The process of turning plastic into fabric begins by emptying, sorting, and crushing the bottles at the recycling center. After that, they are chopped into small plastic flakes and shipped to a facility that is designed to turn the flakes into PET pellets. PET stands for Polyethylene Terephthalate, and is a form of polyester that is made from the synthetic fibers that are found in liquid containers. At the facility, the flakes are screened and washed to remove caps, labels, and contaminates. Then they are melted into small plastic pellets that make the process easier.
The pellets are then melted again into a thick liquid, then they are put through a device that turns gooey plastic into thin fibers that solidify as they exit into the cool air; this device is called a spinneret. Spinnerets are used to produce a fine polyester yarn that is five times finer than human hair. This yarn is sent to a mill that weaves it into a fabric. The fabric is sent to manufacturing facilities and is made into clothing and accessories, such as gloves, shirts, blankets, and bags.
Last Saturday, my friends and I went the North Point Recycling center to do some service work. I didn’t see it as a punishment, I was sort of excited because I not only got to spend a day with my friends, but I also wanted to see the blanket. I didn’t really believe the Internet because I didn’t think that blankets made out of plastic could be comfortable, so I wanted to get some first-hand experience. After having a good time on the subway there, a ride full of joking and laughter, we got to work. The first thing the manager showed us was the final product. She let us feel the blanket and I was shocked to find out how soft it actually was! I would never have guessed that blanket was made from recycled plastic. In my mind, I always thought plastic would be uncomfortable to wear because I always thought of plastic bottles. I never thought that they would melt it into fine threads and actually make a product that was as soft as my blankets at home! Feeling and touching the blanket completely changed my mind about this subject and more questions arose. Can something this comfortable possibly be very environmentally friendly? Surely they used a lot of energy and fuel to turn the plastic into what we see as recycling. But does making these blankets still have more positive affects on the environment than negative?
Recycling these plastic bottles does have many positive affects on the environment. Firstly, it reduces the amount of plastic that we need to put in landfills. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, there are over 3,000 landfills in the United States currently being used, and over 10,000 old landfills. Since modern landfills are sealed tightly in an attempt to protect the environment from contamination, it makes it harder for things to biodegrade. This causes biodegradable items to take decades to decay because they are sealed off from air and water. So recycling plastic bottles can help us keep a clean environment.
Flame-retardants and cadmium are chemicals that are used when making plastic. These are all very harmful to the environment and to people if they swallow or breathe in the fumes. Sometimes, water becomes contaminated and the chemicals leak into the soil and underground water. Eventually the chemicals spread and can contaminate wells, streams, rivers, and even the fish and other sea creatures that we eat. All this garbage can attract things such as rats and flies; these animals can pick up diseases and spread them to people. So the making of plastic not only affects the environment, but in the end, it also affects people.
Recycling plastic also saves precious resources in the earth such as petroleum. Recycling plastic products such as plastic water bottles, soda bottles, milk, and juice jugs reduce the need for petroleum to make new plastic products. So the less plastic we need, the more petroleum we save, which means more petroleum left for the things that actually need it such as factories, airplanes, cars, etc. Despite all these positive affects, there are some negative affects too. The burning and melting of plastic releases furans, dioxane, phthalates, and other plasticizers into the atmosphere that are considered to be bad for our health. Of course, weaning ourselves from petroleum is the best long term solution.
According to the American Plastics Council, over 2.5 million plastic bottles are used each hour in the United Sates alone! To make matters worse, 100,000 marine animals die a year because of plastic in the ocean! We need to put a stop to not only using plastic bottles, but also disposing of them incorrectly. If we don’t, who knows what the earth will look like 50 years from now? Maybe Wall-E was right: we’ll have mountains of trash everywhere. The method of turning plastic into clothing is killing two birds with one stone: it both helps people in need of clothes, and recycles this plastic creatively, that otherwise would have ended up in landfills, or even in the ocean.
This is the definition of ‘ingenious‘ from New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Edition :
Someone who is ingenious is both inventive and resourceful, with a dose of cleverness thrown in (: the ingenious idea of using recycled plastic to create a warm, fleecelike fabric).