How a Bottle Becomes a Fleece

Here's a number to start with. One fleece jacket takes about twenty-five plastic bottles. That's roughly what you'd drink in a month of bottled water.

So where do the bottles go? Picture a yellow bottle of water dropped into a yellow recycling bin. It feels like the end of the road. It's actually the start of one. Sorting, crushing, melting, spinning. Then a warm jacket you might pull on this winter. No magic in it. Just a dozen ordinary factory steps, one after another.

First, the bottle gets taken apart. The cap comes off and goes to a separate pile. It's made from a different, denser plastic that melts at a different temperature. Left in the batch, it spoils the whole lot. The label goes too, because glue and ink behave unpredictably in the melt.

Then comes sorting by color. Clear bottles travel on their own, apart from the blue and green ones. Mix them, and you get a murky gray mass. You can't pull a white thread from that. And dyeing it again costs more than making new thread from scratch.

So does any bottle do, as long as the plastic is the same? No. A bottle that held cooking oil is often set aside on the line. Even a faint trace of grease soaks into the plastic, and an ordinary wash can't lift it. One bottle like that can turn a whole batch yellow.

The bottles that pass are crushed into small flakes. The industry calls them flex. The flakes are washed, dried and melted. Then the melt is pushed through tiny holes, and out comes a thread thinner than a human hair.

The thread is spun into yarn. The yarn is knitted into fabric, and the fabric is brushed until it grows a soft pile. That's fleece. It's the same bottle, only now it keeps you warm instead of crunching underfoot.

Now, a fair warning. A jacket made of bottles doesn't break down any faster than an ordinary one. That was never the point. The point is that the plastic gets a second life instead of a landfill.

And that cap you twisted off? It played its part too.

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