Recycled & Reused — How Your Used Plastics Are Turned Into Sustainable Winter Wear

Marie Danes
3 min readNov 27, 2021

Plastics are incredibly useful, for just about everything, it seems.

No matter where you look, there are products made using plastic — and that’s starting to turn into a problem.

While plastic is remarkably useful, it also comes with a few downsides.

Thankfully some eco-friendly brands are finding innovative ways to limit the negative impact of our plastic consumption, and turn our used plastics into new products.

The Problem

The biggest issue, from an environmental viewpoint, is that they last forever.

Well, practically forever, anyways.

Photo by tanvi sharma on Unsplash

Normally that would be a huge selling point, right?

Who doesn’t want products that last practically forever?

Unfortunately, we don’t use those products for nearly as long as the plastic is going to last — we just toss them out.

Then instead of biodegrading and breaking down, the plastics just kind of… sit there… forever.

That doesn’t sound so bad — until you consider the vast amount of plastic we humans dispose of, every single day.

The Solution

Solving our plastic problem is going to take a lot of work, and there is no single solution.

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

Recycling our plastic is a huge step in the right direction, and will not only reduce the amount of plastic that we throw out — but also limit the amount of new plastic we create.

It’s not as easy as just throwing it in a melting pot and turning it into new products, though.

Forward-thinking fashion brands are a great example, as they’ve found a way to reuse discarded plastic bottles by making them into recycled polyester.

The bottles are shredded, melted, turned into pellets, and then spun and pulled like taffy to turn it into yarn.

This means that not only are the plastic bottles not ending up in a landfill, they’re also not creating more plastic for your winter wear that would also eventually end up in the trash.

How You Can Help

Doing your own part is actually pretty easy — it only involves 2 simple steps.

The first step is to recycle your own gently used clothing, whether it’s winter jackets or T-shirts.

They may be passed on to others if they’re still in excellent condition, or broken down and turned into new materials for next year’s clothing lines.

The second step is to make sure you wear sustainable clothing yourself — like jackets made with recycled polyester as we discussed before.

If you can do both in the same location, that’s even better — but there are only a few environmentally-friendly fashion brands that offer both recycling and recycled products.

The Choice Is Yours

With close to 8 billion people on the planet, it’s easy to see why people think their individual actions don’t matter — but they do.

Your choices today won’t just affect the products that end up in the trash when you’re done with them — they also help to decide which companies succeed and which don’t.

Every purchase you make is like a vote for which companies should make it big, and provide us with the products we need.

Make your vote count — and make it for a company that’s sustainable.

Your choices make a difference.

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