One of the ways companies have been trying to reduce the impacts of clothing is using recycled materials, primarily in the form of adding recycled plastic bottles to clothes.
Newly launched clothing company
Playback takes that one step further, using only recycled materials - cotton, plastic bottles and polyester - in its T-shirts, hoodies and sweatshirts, and even conducted a lifecycle analysis (LCA) to show the benefits of its products. Along with using entirely recycled materials, the company does not add any dyes to color its yarn.
The LCA was done by two students from Yale University's Graduate Program in
Environmental Studies, and found that a Playback sweatshirt outperforms conventional sweatshirts in 23 of 25 environmental categories.
When compared to a conventional cotton/polyester sweatshirt, the Playback sweatshirt made of 70 percent recycled cotton and 30 percent recycled polyester resulted in:
* 80 percent less waste
* 79 percent fewer fossil fuels used
* 68 percent less global warming potential
* 49 percent less air pollution
* 33 percent less land used
* 25 percent fewer carcinogens
Playback makes its clothes by collecting plastic bottles, glass bottles and post-industrial cotton scraps. The items are sorted by color, broken down into fibers and paired with recycled cotton or polyester. The fibers are re-spun into yarn and knitted into clothes.
The hoodies and sweatshirts are made with 70 percent recycled cotton and 30 percent recycled polyester. The recycled PET shirts contain 65 percent recycled polyester from PET (equivalent to 8.5 bottles) and 35 percent recycled cotton. And the recycled cotton T-shirts are a 50/50 blend of recycled cotton and recycled polyester.
