Polyester

Plastic bottles are everywhere, whether they are soda bottles, water bottles or even reusable bottles. Each year the number of plastic bottles filling up landfills is increasing by a considerable amount, which is a serious problem and can result in grave consequences for the environment. The average time estimated for a plastic bottle to decompose is approximately seven hundred years. One way to solve this problem is to recycle plastic bottles into the polyester by a process called polymerization. A lot of textile industries select polyester as their choice of fibre and fabric. Polyester is extensively used in manufacturing all kinds of clothes and home furnishings. According to Kris Barber (2011, page2), it takes about three bottles to make

In accordance with Brighton and Hove City Council (No date), Once the plastic got sorted, it needs to be washed. But before starting the washing process, plastic bottles need to be ground into smaller pieces called the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) chips, because washing of plastic bottles while they are in one piece is not considered to be a very advantageous method. Grinding is done by either a plastic grinder or a plastic shredder. Decreasing the surface area of the plastic bottles helps facilitate the washing process. When the grinding job is done the PET chips are still not considered to be suitable enough for being processed into other goods. After shredding, Pet chips are washed with detergents to remove caps, contaminants and labels. Impurities are collected on woven wire screens by a screen changer machine. Once clean, they are prepared for being shredded into smaller particles called the flakes. PET chips are reduced into flakes with the help of a size reduction machine called the granulator. Once the cleaning process is complete, the flakes need to be passed through specially designed equipment which is responsible for further separation. This ensures that different chunks of plastic do not get blended in the final product. The separated plastic flakes are then subjected to a

As reported by West Country Garden (2013) Plastic pellets are transported to a yarn manufacturing centre where they are spun and melted into polyester fibre. Recycled polyester fibre is mixed with new PET fibres and afterwards spun into yarn. The polyester yarn is then sent to a mill where it becomes weaved into polyester fabric. Mills that are used nowadays by textile companies’ use very high-speed weaving machines that perform the job at an unbelievable rate of about two thousand metres per minute. Modern mills are able to produce a never ending variety of polyester fabrics. Weaving is considered to be one of the oldest methods of making fabric out of yarn. Even though the present-day methods are complicated, they are so much faster and the main principle of interweaving polyester yarns stays unchanged. The Lengthwise polyester yarn which is called the warp forms the skeletal structure of the fabric. The Yarn which is interwoven width wise usually requires a lower degree of twisting. Once the polyester pellets have been woven into cloth, it can be considered to be ready for decoration by the textile industries. It can be; embroidered, dyed or printed