Ever wonder how plastic is made into clothing?
I can’t believe it, did you know, not only sheepskin or other things is what your clothes are made out of. Plastic is also what you’re wearing. It’s a bit confusing but it’s pretty cool. The clothes you’re wearing now is probably plastic. Do you want to know how clothes are made out of plastic, well keep reading and you will find out.
First of all, the plastic bottles are all in a truck that delivers recycling in the recycling center.
The first thing they do is shredding the bottles because every single bottle is left with tiny liquid inside. If you don’t shred them then it will affect the quality of the plastic. After shredding them they put it all in a huge container that will be on a huge ship. Then travels around the world to China.
Some of us may think that plastic bottles is rubbish, but in China it’s valuable to them. When the plastic bottles arrive to China they start working. First they separate the clear plastic with the coloured ones. Clear plastic can be made into white clothes and others just normal colours. On every single plastic bottle there are stickers and a lid. They are all separated. The lids are different type of plastic from the bottles, so they put all the plastic lids together and the workers can strain them off the top. Then comes the stickers that’s in a separate bath, the workers needs to be careful when they’re around it because it’s corrosive caustic soda and that’s bad for your skin. After all there swimming they’re left with a pile of clear plastic shreds. The next step is the ovens where it’s mixed with light coloured plastic to produce white coloured clothes.
The plastic will spend 10 hours in the rotating drums slowly drying the plastic. Workers
has to move their car back and forth under the drum to catch the plastic as it falls out. There are other plastic in the oven so they have to watch for that. They got their plastic bottles broken down and mixed to produce the right colours but it’s hard because they’re all in bits of little pieces, so they put it in a rotating screw where it heats up at 270 degrees celcius. It melts the plastic, because we’re making clothes we don’t want it to be a huge lump we want thread.
When it’s done with the rotating screw, it comes down through a huge tube that’s really long. The workers put a huge container at the bottom of each tube to collect the polyester. The polyester is not powerful enough to make cloth yet. So we combined it and stretched it out over and over to board the fibers together while it’s being heated. Now it takes long to make this kind of material which is polyester. After that’s done they tear it apart again then it goes fluffy. Everything is done in that factory so now all the polyester moves to another factory. After all that the plastic from your old bottle now looks like a cotton ball. Then it goes to a machine ready to be carded. Carding helps to strengthens the polyester. When that’s done the polyester is getting ready to turn into thread. It looks ready but it’s actually not. It gets heated then get’s traced. So now they are ready to send it to the sewing area where you can make your clothes.
So now you know how polyester is now turned into clothing. It’s pretty cool. Not all the plastic bottles is turned into bottles. Did you know that shoes can also be made with plastic. There is many different ways that can be made with plastic.
