RPET: Versatile recycled plastic for promotional products

PET (or polyethylene terephthalate) is a strong and lightweight polyester plastic that’s widely used for food packaging and drink bottles. 

Despite its usefulness its impact on the environment is hard to ignore. Not only does its manufacture require a lot of crude oil, water and energy, but discarded products made from PET are a huge part of the world’s plastic waste problem.

For instance, it’s estimated that around a million PET plastic bottles are sold globally every minute, and the vast majority of those end up in landfill, or cluttering up rivers and oceans. That’s a huge issue because they take literally hundreds of years to biodegrade. 

Recycled PET or RPET

The good news is that PET can be efficiently recycled into RPET (or Recycled PET) and used again and again. Once the discarded PET bottles have been collected they are sorted, thoroughly cleaned, and then shredded into RPET pellets. These pellets can be used to make anything from polyester fabrics to another plastic bottle. Not only does this prevent plastic from being dumped into landfill but the environmental impact of RPET manufacturer in terms of energy usage and carbon footprint is much lower than making PET from scratch. 

RPET Useful and versatile

RPET has many different uses depending on how it’s processed, and what follows is just some of those applications…

Woven polyester fabric
RPET can be spun into fibres which are ideal for making textiles. The result is polyester fabric, the durable and lightweight material that’s widely used for clothing, hats, bags etc. It can be brushed to create fleece fabrics that are warm and soft to touch and you’ll find these throughout our catalogue in everything from athletic wear to fleece travel blankets.

Polyester fabric is popular because: it’s easy to dye, allowing vibrant colours; it retains its shape well, and doesn’t wrinkle, tear, stretch, or pill; it dries quickly and is moisture and stain resistant.

Polyester fabric can also be treated so it’s fully waterproof making it ideal for specialist applications like umbrellas, tents, kites, and all-weather clothing such as cagoules and ponchos.

RPET Non-woven polyester felt products

This is an extremely hard-wearing and resilient material that is sufficiently lightweight that it can be made into thick sheets that are ideal for insulation or protective padding. It’s widely used for bags of all kinds including cooler bags that make use of those insulating properties. 

Moulded RPET plastic promotional products

PET/RPET plastic is ubiquitous because it’s strong and lightweight, shatterproof, non-toxic and perfect for injection moulding and thus cost-effective mass-production. We offer plenty of RPET plastic items, from coasters to pens, and we’re sourcing more the whole time.

True sustainability

The best part about RPET is that it is itself easily recyclable. This leaves open the possibility of a circular economy within RPET production, whereby the material is constantly recycled and no new raw materials are required. For industry the ultimate goal is sustainable manufacturing and with RPET that goal stands a good chance of actually being achievable. The technical problems have already been solved, the market just needs to be expanded. So choose RPET products and invest in sustainability.

See a selection of our RPET products below, they're all ready to be customised with your brand or message...