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That towel or T-shirt made from plastic bottles isn’t as eco-friendly as you might think.
Free Country, an outdoor apparel brand, boasts that it has diverted more than 125 million plastic bottles from landfills. “Our FreeCycle® collection transforms plastic waste into eco-conscious adventure wear, so you can embrace sustainability without compromising on style,” its website effuses.
Brands from Patagonia to fast-fashion giant Shein tout their use of textiles derived from recycled plastic. I have a towel whose tag says, “Roughly eight plastic bottles were used!” That little exclamation point chirpily insists that this is unequivocally good.
But — it’s a tale as old as time — this apparent win-win for consumers, companies, and the planet turns out to be a victory mainly for companies, whose sunny marketing belies a darker and more dangerous reality.
Virgin and recycled synthetic textiles are major culprits in microplastic pollution; they account for about 35% of the primary microplastics that wind up in the ocean. In December, the Changing Markets Foundation, a global nonprofit that focuses on leveraging markets to solve sustainability challenges, commissioned a study that found that, contrary to industry claims, recycled polyester sheds more microfibers than virgin polyester.
The harms of microplastics — particles the size of a sesame seed or smaller — are manifold. In the seas, they absorb toxins and carry disease, which wreak havoc when marine life inevitably consumes them. They disrupt the internal functions of everything from zooplankton on up to fish, seals, dolphins, and birds.
They’re a catastrophe for land-dwellers, too. Microplastics have invaded our bloodstreams and tissues, causing inflammation and cell damage in our brains, lungs, hearts, and beyond.
Children, who breathe, eat, and drink more relative to their body weight than adults and whose immune systems are still under construction, are especially at risk. A 2024 study analyzed 62 placental tissue samples. The researchers found microplastics in all of them.
The Polyester Plague
In the 1930s and ’40s, scientists discovered that we could wear crude oil. Refineries heat petroleum to yield the chemicals ethylene and p-xylene, which are heated and condensed into polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, the same plastic that bottles are made of. This chemical syrup is cooled, chopped up, melted again, and squeezed through a spinneret to make threads.
Polyester, a now-ubiquitous material, is about 50% cheaper to make than cotton, and that cost difference has literally fueled textile production: Global fiber output has doubled since the turn of the millennium. Polyester makes up 59% of textile production around the world, and the material has found its way into not only clothes but also carpets, umbrellas, towels, sleeping bags, blankets, and more. Nearly 70% of the textiles manufactured worldwide are made from fibers derived from fossil fuels.
Polyester, nylon, and other synthetic fibers have revolutionized athletic wear, technical apparel, outdoors gear, and haute couture. It’s also made clothes cheap and disposable, and manufacturers are happy to churn out more and more to satisfy consumers’ voracious, capricious tastes.
The key is to cut back on virgin and recycled synthetic fibers and urge lawmakers and regulators to limit shedding and incentivize manufacturers to phase out fibers derived from fossil fuels.
Much of the polyester used in clothing is recycled. “Adidas claims that 99% of its polyester is recycled, and H&M reports that in 2024, 94% of the polyester it sourced was recycled,” the Changing Markets report notes. “Even Patagonia — often held up as a sustainability leader — discloses that 93.6% of its polyester is recycled (mostly from plastic bottles), which represents more than half (52%) of its entire materials.”
Fast-fashion giant Shein turns out 10,000 garments every day. Almost all are made from synthetic fibers, and many are made from recycled plastic. “They’re not a textile company, I would say,” says Nusa Urbancic, Changing Markets’ CEO and an author on the December report. “They’re basically a plastic producer.”
But What’s Wrong With Recycling?
Washing and wearing synthetic textiles naturally causes the fibers to break down. In washing machines, garments shed fibers, which are then borne through pipes to waterways and the sea. These nefarious fiber fragments elude filtration systems, and no amount of optimization in the manufacturing process can entirely eliminate shedding.
Recycling actually makes the shedding problem worse. The process of turning PET plastics like bottles into polyester weakens the material’s polymer chains, which makes the resulting fibers brittle and more likely to fracture and shed.
Aluminum cans are the poster child for closed-loop recycling systems — they can be recycled infinitely. Not so for plastic bottles, whose quality degrades each time they’re recycled. Still, from an environmental perspective, it’s preferable to recycle bottles as many times as possible, seven or eight times, rather than to downcycle them into fibers, which forecloses any possibility of future recycling. “If you recycle bottles into clothes,” Urbancic says, “it’s a one-way ticket to a landfill or incineration.”
Go au Naturel
While solutions like washing-machine filters help reduce the amount of microplastics leaching into waterways from our homes, they cannot completely solve the insidious pollution problem with roots in a gargantuan industry. (Textile manufacturing — the third-largest employer globally — is one of the world’s biggest industries.) The only real solution is to get manufacturers to cut back on virgin and recycled synthetic fibers.
What can you do? Urge lawmakers and regulators to limit shedding and incentivize manufacturers to phase out fibers derived from fossil fuels. Buy fewer garments and steer clear of fast fashion. When you do buy new clothes, opt for natural materials like cotton and wool, and prioritize lasting quality. Wash synthetics less often and on gentler cycles.
Support local textile producers and brands like Mover and Icebreaker that are resisting the worldwide craze for plastic clothes. And look askance at marketing claims about the eco-friendliness of recycled polyester and other textiles made from crude oil.
“Companies,” Urbancic says, “are very good at deceiving us.”
