How Do You Turn Plastic Into Wearable Material

Fast fashion is the second biggest source of environmental pollution on Earth. According to a study, nearly 20 to 25% of waste is created by the fashion industry alone, combined with the plastic industry, this waste percentage reaches up to shocking levels. We all are well aware of the fact that plastic is a non-biodegradable material that we are seeing take over our oceans, beaches - well the whole world!
However, there are now ways through which we can turn plastics into wearable fabric, in our case; swimwear! A lot of ethical fashion brands are making efforts to reduce the single-use plastic pollution by collecting plastic bottles and containers and making clothing out of the yarn created with plastic. And we are one of those brands - yes we know we’re awesome! We use recycled plastic to make our high premium swimming shorts - we’re told that approximately 12 bottles are re-purposed into each pair of shorts.

How Do You Turn Plastic Into Yarn / Thread?

We should all be familiar polyester, right? Well it’s a material which can easily be achieved with the help of plastic. And here’s how:

Step #1 Collect Plastic:

The first step is collecting plastic from the landfills, oceans, or even cities. It is massively important to ensure this doesn’t harm the natural habitat of animals and marine life. From plastic bottles to containers, all plastic products are gathered up and sent to a plastic processing factory.

Step #2 Break It Down:

Those plastic products are separated, and the recyclable plastic is passed through a chopping machine that breaks everything down into small chips, once all the paper labels are removed. Those chunky plastic chips are further processed to turn them into the machine to make them finer.

Step #3 Melt The Chips:

All the processed, fine plastic chips are thrown into a melting machine that treats the plastic at high heat. The melted plastic is then filtered to remove any kind of impurity. This step is essential to bring the plastic to phase-1 of the recycled fabric making process.

Step #4 Spin It Into Yarn:

Once all the plastic is melted and filtered, it goes through the spinning process. The melted plastic is turned into polyester yarns and spun together with the yarn of choice to make the plastic fabric wearable. The yarn is collected and passed on to the weaving department.

Step #5 Weave The Fabric:

The last step is weaving the polyester into the fabric. You can make anything from jackets to gowns to dresses or even our awesome swimwear from this yarn!

Check out https://www.randycow.com/pages/we-care for everything you need to know about repurposing single-use plastic into wearable fabric.
By following these steps, fashion brands, like Randy Cow, create recycled plastic fabric and help chip into the plastic problem we are facing.

So do your bit today to save the world, and trust yourself to an awesome part of our Swim Shorts :)

And finally, to prove we’re not just trying to jump on the band wagon and that we actually practice what we preach, here is our certification for our fabrics: