About Sustaining Voices
Sourcing Journal’s Sustaining Voices celebrates the efforts the apparel industry is making toward securing a more environmentally responsible future through creative innovations, scalable solutions and forward-thinking initiatives that are spinning intent into action.
Overview
Eco Spindles’ first-of-its-kind plant transforms castoff plastic bottles into clothing yarn.
Deep Dive
While many sustainability efforts center around the use of cotton, the Eco Spindles factory is taking a different route: transforming post-consumer plastic bottles into polyester yarn.
Established in Sri Lanka in 2018, the 13,000-square-meter plant bypasses the polymerization process of converting PET flakes to chips to yarn, instead creating the yarn directly from the flakes. Color pigments can be inserted as part of the extrusion process via dope dyeing, according to the company, further enhancing sustainability by avoiding the discharge of colored waste.
In addition to manufacturing yarn, Eco Spindles also makes monofilaments for cleaning tools, and the company abides by the Global Recycled Standard (GRS), Restricted Substances Lists (RSL) and Oeko-Tex Standard 100. Its parent company, BPPL Holdings, collects roughly 200 to 250 tons of PET waste each month, with approximately 70 tons used to generate the synthetic yarn and 150 tons to produce synthetic brush filaments.
According to Eco Spindles, it takes 10 plastic bottles to make a new T-shirt and 63 bottles to make a sweater. The plant is capable of supplying 15 percent of the polyester yarn required by Sri Lanka’s textile and apparel sectors, it said.
While Eco Spindles is the only factory in Sri Lanka capable of creating yarn from flakes, it may soon have company. BPPL Holdings says it plans to spend up to 1.5 billion rupees ($21.3 million) on a second yarn-production plant on the same premises.