Outdoor products with materials made from recycled PET bottles

PET bottles can become a source material for outdoor products after use. At VAUDE, we use recycled PET for selected materials and components, including insulation, padding, fleece, polyester yarn and, from summer 2024, selected hard plastic parts.

Around 500 billion PET bottles are sold worldwide every year. No wonder, since they are available everywhere and are really practical. They are lightweight and virtually unbreakable. If we were to line up these 500 billion bottles along the equator, there would be enough to circle the earth once every two hours. 40.075 kilometers of plastic bottles every two hours! Most PET bottles are disposed of. Unfortunately, many also end up in nature, on landfills or are incinerated - this is referred to somewhat euphemistically as thermal recycling.

To reuse the polyester of plastic bottles so well, a so-called mechanical recycling is used. Unlike the chemical recycling, the mechanical variant is not a pioneering technical work, but still highly effective. The basic principle is simple: first, the plastic bottles must be collected. In Germany, this works very well thanks to the deposit system. In a recycling plant, they are then sorted by color, freed from other materials (e.g. labels), shredded into flakes and cleaned. The resulting PET flakes are then melted down and processed into granules, which serve as the starting material for all further applications.

In the case of functional outdoor clothing, for example, fleece or insulation fillings for jackets are made from it. To produce classic textiles, a high-quality polyester yarn is spun from the granules. At VAUDE, we process the fabrics woven from it into bags, pants, jackets and other products.

Best of all, the products made from recycled bottles feel just as good as those made from virgin raw materials. Only experts in the lab can distinguish the recycled polyester from fabrics newly produced from petroleum. In contrast to chemical recycling, the chemical structure of the plastic is not changed by the melting and forming process. This has the advantage that the process consumes relatively little energy.

On the other hand, it has its limits: Since in practice a tiny amount of impurities always remains, PET cannot be melted down and reprocessed as often as desired. In mechanical recycling, the entire process determines the possible end product: the purer and cleaner the waste that the recycling plant processes, the better the quality of the granulate and consequently of our polyester yarn.

The proven process and the inconceivable amount of available plastic bottles as a resource have contributed to the fact that PET recycling has had a permanent place in our product range for several years now, and is constantly being added to. From 2024, we will also be using zippers made from recycled PET.

However, on the way to a greater proportion of recycled and bio-based materials, we are reaching our limits. We cannot cover all product areas with polyester and natural fibers alone. For many products, we rely on polyamide for the sporty function. This is where chemical recycling comes into play. In a new process, from old car tires polyamide is produced. So the two recycling processes complement each other beautifully.