The Polyester Problem: Fashion’s favorite green illusion
Consumers want greener wardrobes. Or at least they say they do.
Capital One research this spring showed 89% of shoppers worldwide claim to have changed their habits to be more eco-friendly. Music to retailers’ ears. And right on cue, recycled polyester is having a moment.
It’s marketed as fashion’s redemption arc: plastic bottles reborn as yoga pants.
A guilt-free loop.
An easy fix.
Except it’s not.
Polyester is everywhere: 52% of all fibre production, two-thirds of our clothes. It can feel like silk, mimic wool, breathe like linen. It’s also petroleum-based plastic.
When bottles get spun into clothes, they leave the closed-loop recycling system that once gave them up to ten lives.
Your eco-hoodie? It rarely gets recycled again. After a handful of wears, it’s landfill-bound. The “recycled” halo hides the fact that fashion is speeding up waste, not slowing it.
Virgin or recycled, polyester behaves the same: it sheds microfibres with every wash.
Those tiny plastics end up in waterways, oceans, and eventually... us. That “sustainable” tag doesn’t change the shedding.
Greenwashing in Action
Brands know a good marketing hook when they see one. Nike boasts it diverts a billion bottles a year. H&M, Gap, J Crew and others promise 45% recycled polyester by 2025. Old Navy upped the ante to 60%.
But let’s be clear: a recycled waistband does not equal a climate solution. As Ashley Gill of Textile Exchange put it:
“One of the hallmarks of greenwashing is taking one piece of the puzzle and extrapolating broad benefits from that.”
The Real Emissions Elephant
The big lie in all this? Polyester isn’t even fashion’s dirtiest problem. 76% of a garment’s emissions come from textile mills: spinning, dyeing, finishing. The energy-guzzling, coal-heavy stages nobody puts in the marketing copy.
But “improving mill efficiency” doesn’t sell yoga leggings. “Made from recycled bottles” does.
Less than 1% of clothes today are recycled into new fibres. Innovators are pushing for fibre-to-fibre recycling and bio-based synthetics, like Kintra Fibres’ corn- and wheat-derived materials that compost back into nature.
These aren’t mainstream yet, but they address the core issues: microplastic pollution, waste, and true circularity.
Recycled polyester is not worthless, it’s marginally better than virgin plastic. But it’s no magic bullet. It’s a distraction.
A shiny green illusion that buys brands good press while the industry avoids the less glamorous work of cutting emissions where they actually happen.
So next time you see “made from recycled bottles” slapped on a product page, remember: you’re not saving the planet. At best, you’re buying fashion an extra PR campaign.
The Bottom Line
All of it is toxic, releasing "toxicity debt" as it breaks down, leading to health issues such as cancer, fertility problems, and genetic mutations in fetuses.
The petrochemical industry largely ignores this apocalyptic problem, focusing instead on increasing plastic production to meet consumer demand rather than investing in alternative energy.
Plastic production is mostly unregulated, resulting in thousands of unknown monomers being created. When harmful substances like BPA are banned, even more dangerous alternatives often replace them.
These issues are well-documented by the scientific community, making credible studies readily available.
These characteristics and issues with plastic are becoming so well documented by the scientific community that it is not hard to find sources and studies:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c07781
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7931444/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349402092_The_Global_Plastic_Toxicity_Debt
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00863-2
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2022.910094/full
💡 Save this thought: Sustainability isn’t about chasing the least guilty option. It’s about asking harder questions:
Will this last?
Can it be recycled again?
Or is it just tomorrow’s landfill with a green sticker?
Vera
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