Plastic bottles are found littering India's landscapes far and wide. But the material can be recycled to make threads for clothing — turning plastic waste into fashion highlights.
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00:00 This machine is blending polyester and cotton threads to form fabric.
00:07 But these polyester threads aren't made directly from petroleum.
00:11 It's sourced from recycled PET bottles.
00:16 PET bottle is an engineering plastics, okay.
00:20 Highly viscoelastic in the sense when you stretch it, I get a fiber.
00:25 PET bottles are there plenty.
00:27 So why not I make a fiber out of PET bottles?
00:30 India alone consumes 1.4 million tons of PET plastic every year.
00:35 Along with it comes a responsibility to handle that plastic waste in an efficient manner.
00:40 Sriranga Polymers located at Karur in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu converts
00:45 PET bottles to apparel.
00:47 It all starts with rag pickers who collect the bottles and give them to an agent.
00:51 The agent converts these bottles into stacked compressed plastics which arrive at this crushing
00:56 facility.
01:02 Every month they crush 800 tons of PET plastic.
01:06 These PET bottles go through various stages of sorting where PET bottles are separated
01:11 from bottle caps, paper and other materials.
01:14 These are then shredded to obtain these tiny plastic pieces called recycled PET flakes.
01:24 These flakes are washed with caustic soda, rinsed and dried to remove dirt, silt and
01:30 other materials.
01:31 Nearly 98% of all water used in this process is purified, recycled and reused.
01:39 The next step is to melt these hot washed flakes and convert them to polyester fibers
01:44 according to customer requirements.
01:47 Production of polyester fiber is done by a technology called dope dyed technology.
01:53 The advantage is that we do not use a single drop of water in coloring the polyester fiber.
02:02 To dye one kilo of fabric you need 4 or 5 times the amount of water.
02:08 That will pollute our water, land, everything.
02:11 Whereas in dope dye technology we integrate the color while melting the plastic.
02:18 So when the polymer itself is colored, you do not need further dyeing.
02:23 These fibers are used in the manufacture of automobiles, home furnishing and apparels.
02:29 In dispersed dye the coating on top will fade away with 2 or 3 washes whereas this material
02:34 will not fade as the color is present in the core.
02:39 Finally the polyester fiber is mixed with other materials like cotton to form fabrics
02:44 which are then tailored to make various apparels.
02:48 Ultimately a product which is ranked as super sustainable product.
02:53 It is normally 20% more than the conventional polyester fabric based garments.
02:59 So people who believe in this recycling we give them the traceability information from
03:04 garment to the waste bottle that is being picked up.
03:07 So any consumer who buys our garment there is a QR code which he can scan and he will
03:13 know from where the waste was collected for his particular garment.
03:18 In India the textile industry accounts for nearly 5% of the country's GDP.
03:23 Fortunately the sustainable fashion market in the country is set to grow at 11% and reach
03:28 10 billion US dollars by 2025.
03:31 Customers are willing to pay more because there is a cost associated with that.
03:35 And we are all seeing the effect of climate change.
03:38 So there is a good reception for sustainable clothing amongst customers.
03:43 It's a question of reach.
03:45 We need to reach to them.
03:46 We need to educate them on this and I think we'll be there.
03:52 By using just a portion of that fiber they produce 5000 apparel every month and have
03:57 2300 unique customers.
04:00 On the whole Sriranga polymers use no new petroleum and instead convert 1.5 million
04:07 bottles every day to manufacture polyester.