Why RPET?
PET is one of the most common types of plastic/packaging found in your average household. Most of us casually use single use plastic every day without really thinking about it. That cheeky croissant on the way to work, the coffee, the receipt for car parking tickets. All of these items might serve a purpose for anywhere between 10 minutes and a few hours – unfortunately, these bags, cups, and receipts will live on far longer than us. You might be thinking what’s one bag, one cup… says seven billion people. With experts saying there could be more plastic than fish in the ocean by volume by 2050, we were driven to create
MISA as a response to the use of our oceans as a dumping ground.
We at MISA Collective want Everyone to be part of the solution.
Our reusable produce bags are made using RPET – Recycled polyethylene Terephthalate AKA single-use plastic bottles. By choosing RPET we are making a conscious choice to upcycle a material that already exists. We thought about organic cotton, we love organic cotton, so pretty, so aesthetically pleasing, but cotton has it’s dirty little secrets too – did you know it takes 10,000 liters of water to make 1 kilogram of cotton, not to mention the pesticides. Cultivating cotton has had devastating effects on the Aral Sea – what & where is the Aral Sea I hear you ask. Exactly. It WAS the 4th largest lake in the world that is mostly gone due to heavy cotton cultivation in the 60’s. The UN called it
“one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters”. Let’s face it we don’t want to be part of that statistic.
So let us tell you how RPET is made, it’s pretty simple. In reality, we’re surprised not more people are using it.
Post-consumer PET bottles are collected and sent to recycling centers where it is crushed down into bales. The bales are purchased by recycling companies where the PET bottles are crushed, washed, separated and dried out. These bottles are blitzed into tiny tiny pieces and washed again to give pure PET flakes. These flakes are melted down and spun into a plastic fiber that can be woven into new sheets of material, RPET.
We hope you all use your Keep Cups, Kleenkanteens, Swell bottles and other reusable drink containers like the conscious consumers you are. But while society works on creating less plastic bottles, MISA Collective will add our contribution by choosing RPET and upcycling materials that already exist to lessen the impact on the environment. And we are in good company; fashion brands are also following suit. Eco-conscious favorite Everlane recently launched a whole line of outerwear made entirely from RPET, as did Patagonia with their renewed polyester material. Love that the Movement Into Sustainable Action is happening! What other fashion or homeware brands do you know of making an effort to use recycled source material??
Follow MISA Collective and our Eco Hacks for some more inspiration.
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