If you're making company shirts, whether they're for employee uniforms, trade show swag, or merchandise in a store, you want to know what the best shirts available are to use as a base. There are a ton of options, but when you're focused on ethics and sustainability, two options come to the forefront: recycled polyester and organic cotton.
How do these two stack up, and which one should you choose for your company shirts? Let's compare them.
Material Basics: Organic Cotton
Most of us know what cotton is. The fibrous plant has been a staple of textiles for millennia, with records going back at least as far as 5500 BCE. It's grown, harvested, ginned into fabric, and assembled into apparel through a multi-step process that has been refined over a very, very long time.
While all cotton is organic (being as it's a plant-based material), the designation "organic cotton" applies specifically to cotton that is grown without the use of pesticides and other chemicals that can damage watersheds and harm the ecosystem. Both conventional cotton and organic cotton are common in today's apparel industry, though organic cotton is growing more and more common.
Material Basics: Recycled Polyester
Polyester is a much, much more recent development, comparatively. While "natural" polyesters technically exist in certain species of plants and as a byproduct for a certain species of bee, when most people talk about polyester, they're talking about the synthetic polymer. Polyesters come in many different forms, with the version used in apparel being one of the first developed. Polyester was invented in the 1920s.
Despite taking the form of a fabric, polyester is a form of plastic. In fact, polyester fabrics are one of the leading causes of environmental microplastics, the microscopic molecules of plastics that have broken down and suffused into virtually everything.
Obviously, virgin polyester – that is, brand-new polyester made fresh – is a terribly unsustainable material. Recycled polyester, though, is a different story. Polyester can be recycled by melting down and processing discarded and reclaimed polyester products, whether it's bottles washed up on a beach or plastic waste diverted from a landfill.
Recycled polyester is still polyester, yes, but it removes polyester from the waste stream, reduces the need for virgin polyester to be manufactured, and helps cut back on the damage caused by polyester manufacturing and disposal.
As such, it's becoming more common as a sustainable alternative to some other fabrics, most notably the virgin materials that do more harm in their production.
Cotton vs. rPET: Environmental Impact of Creation
First, it makes sense to start at the beginning of the life cycle of the material.
For organic cotton, this means farms. Cotton farms producing organic cotton are somewhere in the middle of the road as far as materials are concerned. Organic cotton does not use pesticides and fertilizers that can damage the local ecosystem, and sustainable farming techniques have been developed over the years to find ways to reduce the impact on watersheds and ecosystems around the farms. We still have a long way to go – monoculture farms are dangerous no matter what the crop is – but it's still better than conventional cotton.
On the other hand, organic cotton isn't the best possible source of a material. Some organic materials, like bamboo, are even better for water usage, land usage, and sustainability.
As for recycled polyester, it depends on where you consider to be the start of life for the material. All recycled polyester comes from previously virgin polyester. Polyester degrades when it's recycled, so the process can only be performed once or twice before it's no longer suitable for something like apparel.
If you consider that recycled polyester's raw material is polyester removed from the environment and landfills, it's generally a positive. However, the recycling process itself also consumes water and uses chemicals that can't be avoided, so it's difficult to say it's devoid of environmental impact.
The winner here is generally the cotton, though by less of a margin than some people might think.
Cotton vs. rPET: Water Concerns
We've touched on it a bit above, but since water – the consumption of water, water pollution, and other concerns – is a primary area of vigilance for many people, it's worth talking about directly.
With cotton, water is consumed in the farming process, and it's unavoidable. Plants need water to grow. Modern organic farming options consume less water than conventional cotton did, and many cotton farms today are very careful about their impact on local watersheds, but that's not universally the case. There are still many massive monoculture cotton farms, particularly in Asia, that effectively divert entire watershed ecosystems just to fuel the farms.
Recycled polyester consumes some water in the recycling process, but it also saves some of the water in the environment by preventing that polyester from reaching landfills or watersheds in the first place. It's not indefinite, however, and eventually, that polyester reaches the end of its lifespan.
Cotton edges out the win on this one, but it's almost entirely on the back of the fact that polyester comes from somewhere, and the original creation of virgin polyester is so bad that even rPET isn't free from the stigma. The math might change if rPET is made even more effective and ways to remove it from the environment are developed, but for now, we'll give cotton the edge.
Cotton vs. rPET: End of Life
What happens to the material when it reaches the end of its life?
With cotton, there are a couple of options. Recycling cotton is one of them; recycled cotton can be used for other purposes. It's shredded and repurposed into everything from stuffing to new fabrics. It rarely makes fresh apparel, however; due to the shorter thread length of cotton fibers after it's shredded, it doesn't make for durable fabric on its own. It needs to be mixed, often with polyester, to create a cotton-polyester blend.
When cotton fully reaches the end of its lifespan and ends up in landfills, there's some good news. Since cotton is a plant product, it biodegrades relatively easily. Depending on the conditions, it can break down into different components; under poor conditions, it can turn into methane, which is a greenhouse gas. Under better conditions, it breaks down into CO2, also a greenhouse gas, but not as bad of one. It breaks down relatively quickly, as well, and leaves behind other components that can even enrich soil.
Polyester, meanwhile, simply doesn't break down. It breaks apart into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic until it becomes microplastics.
There are ongoing experiments looking into ways to treat polyester in ways that prevent it from becoming harmful to the environment. A variety of experiments have been conducted with promising, though small-scale, results. For example, one firm has developed a bacterial process that can essentially reverse polyester and convert it back into oil, and another has found a way to engineer e.coli of all things and convert polyester into Tylenol.
None of this is perfect, and in the meantime, billions of tons of polyester are breaking down into microplastics all around the world.
Cotton also comes out ahead in this balance, unsurprisingly.
Cotton vs. rPET: Other Environmental Impact
One of the more often overlooked elements of cotton's environmental impact is the space it takes up. Cotton farms are huge, and since cotton isn't as fast-growing as something like hemp or bamboo, it's a slower and less effective use of that land than other potential purposes.
Polyester, especially recycled polyester, requires orders of magnitude less land use. After all, it's more of a chemical processing facility than acres upon acres of farmland, right? The impact of drilling for oil to make the polymers in the first place should also be considered, but it can be hard to estimate the land use of a farm stretched horizontally versus a well dug vertically.
It's hard to overstate the impact of microplastics, of course. We're still figuring out all of the ways that microplastic saturation is going to damage the world around us, and we may not fully know for decades. Cotton doesn't have that problem.
Recycled polyester does help pull a lot of plastic waste from the pipeline that leads to landfills and water, which is good. Interestingly, if recycled polyester becomes more popular while other purposes of plastic are reduced, there could be a tipping point where demand exceeds potential supply. That would be a good place to reach, certainly.
Cotton vs. rPET: Comfort and Wearability
Speaking less about the raw materials and more about the finished products, there are some differences in the materials produced using cotton and rPET.
Generally speaking, cotton is heavier but more breathable and can have a much softer feeling. It's quite durable for an organic fabric, though in terms of longevity, polyester beats it out. Since it's well-known for softness and breathability, it's common for fabrics used in hot and humid environments and can be more comfortable for many general use purposes.
Polyester, on the other hand, is thinner, stretchy, and moisture-wicking but less breathable. It's somewhat more durable but traps heat more easily. It's often found as a key component in gear for colder areas and can be used as part of a windbreaker or other item as well. It does resist wrinkles very well and never needs ironing the way cotton might.
One potential concern is that, as a plant material, some people could be allergic to cotton. That said, it's extremely rare; in fact, it's more likely to be an element of the dye or chemicals used in processing, and people can have similar reactions to polyester. Cotton is broadly considered hypoallergenic for this reason. Textile dermatitis is quite rare but can happen, so neither textile wins over the other in that area.
Cotton vs. rPET: Cost
On a sheer comparison of the money it takes to purchase a piece of apparel made out of the material, cotton comes in second. Organic cotton is a time-intensive and labor-intensive fabric, since farming isn't cheap, ginning isn't easy, and it all takes a lot of time. Polyester, meanwhile, is a highly automated industrial process that needs relatively little labor. The largest investment in labor in making recycled polyester is in the beginning, where the materials to be recycled are separated out.
This is, however, just general estimates. A lot depends on your supplier. For example, if you browse our store, you can find that our eco-friendly rPET jersey tees (made of a hybrid fabric made from both organic cotton and recycled polyester) are slightly more expensive than our 100% cotton tees.
In fact, that brings up a key point that's worth making: why not both?
Pure cotton and recycled cotton might not have the material properties you want out of a piece of apparel. Recycled polyester loses durability over time. By mixing the two materials, you create a mixed material that brings the best of both worlds into one fabric. Why compare the two when you can just use both?
Which to Pick: Cotton or Polyester?
If you're comparing cotton and polyester for your company apparel, you have to weigh which particular concerns are the most important to you and your customers or other recipients of the apparel. If your business is very concerned with plastic waste and microplastics in the environment, you'll want to go with cotton over polyester. If you're more concerned about water usage and the acreage used on huge farms that could be better utilized, polyester might be the better bet. You can also find ways to invest in promoting the sustainability of both.
Either way, we encourage you to look around our shop. We have both cotton and recycled polyester materials, as well as a variety of other options for apparel that can suit your needs. We also go out of our way to make sure everything we offer is as ethically produced as possible. We want to help you do good through your choices.
Daniel Cardozo, CEO of Ethix Merch, is a passionate advocate for ethical promotional products. With a mission to transform global supply chains, he serves on the Labor 411 Foundation and Advertising Specialty Institute's Promo for the Planet Advisory Board. Daniel is dedicated to empowering socially and environmentally-conscious consumers.
