rPET Promotional Items: What Are They? Should You Care?

The world is saturated with different kinds of materials, ranging from sustainable organic fibers to wildly unsustainable and damaging chemicals and plastics. In fact, figuring out what to do with the millions of tons of cast-off plastics is a significant industry. Many different options have been proposed, from burning them for energy to bacteria that break them down into oils to recycling them into new forms and purposes.

One of these latter options is growing in use around the world. It's called rPET, and you can find promotional items made out of the stuff. That inevitably leaves you with a question, though: is it all it's cracked up to be, or is it just another smokescreen used to greenwash an environmentally terrible material? Let's talk about it.

First, What is PET?

PET stands for polyethylene terephthalate, which immediately lets you know why people call it PET instead. It's made by a catalytic reaction between ethylene glycol and purified terephthalic acid, which is itself made by oxidizing p-Xylene, which itself is made by a catalytic reaction of petroleum naphtha, a component of crude oil.

So, basically, you take crude oil, separate a part of it out and react it multiple times with various catalysts and chemicals, and eventually, you're left with PET. Byproducts of this reaction are often used in other ways; propylene glycol, for example, is used in everything from antifreeze to eyedrops to ice creams.

Every year, hundreds of millions of tons of PET are produced. It's very, very widely used as a common kind of plastic.

The problem with PET – well, one of many problems with it, really – is that it takes somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 years to biodegrade completely. Given that it was only invented in the 1940s, that means none of the PET created by all of humanity has fully biodegraded by now.

PET is known in environmentalist circles as "virgin plastic." In other words, it's created fresh rather than made out of repurposed or recycled materials.

What is rPET?

This one is pretty simple. The R in rPET just stands for "recycled." The one good thing about PET is that it's 100% recyclable. In fact, out of all of the different plastic materials humanity has created over the last century, PET is the most easily recycled and the most widely recycled.

The process of recycling PET is quite interesting. Since the majority of PET is used in things like plastic bottles – like the soda and water bottles you find on every store shelf in the world – the process is generally standardized around this form. Bottles are broken down, with the labels and caps removed (because they're a different kind of plastic and can't be recycled the same way), and they're usually sorted by color from there.

Once separated and isolated, the PET products are ground up into flakes. These flakes are washed to remove any unnecessary chemicals or contaminants, and then they're melted into solid chunks of resin. This resin is then extruded into thin strands, which are spun into yarn, which can then be used similarly to various textiles.

The rPET production process is linked to many kinds of recycling across the country, from bottle returns to recycling bins to ocean cleanup companies like SeaQual or Plastic Bank, which scour beaches and dredge the oceans for plastic waste, sort it, and send it to recycling in various ways.

And, since rPET can be recycled itself just like PET (since it's not chemically any different), anything made out of rPET can be recycled just as easily as the original PET.

What Kinds of Items are Made from rPET?

Anything that can be made out of PET can be made out of rPET. Coca-Cola produces many of its drink bottles out of rPET now, with the goal of having half of its bottles made from rPET by 2030. You've 100% guaranteed handled, eaten food out of, or enjoyed products made from rPET in your daily life.

As far as promotional items are concerned, you're generally looking at a few categories of products. Since rPET is often used to make a plastic kind of fabric, you often see it in soft-body plastic fabric items. Bags like backpacks, hats, umbrellas, beach towels, and similar items can all be made from rPET.

Some hard-form plastic items can also be made with rPET. For example, notebooks that have plastic covers and inserts may be made from rPET, and you often see more durably-designed water bottles and other reusable bottles made from rPET or from metal with rPET liners.

Before you assume that rPET is too coarse for more comfortable apparel, it's all in the manufacturing. We offer rPET t-shirts, hoodies, and beanies of various sorts to give you an idea. Most of these aren't 100% rPET, though; they're usually a blend of rPET and cotton to combine the benefits of both materials.

What Are the Benefits of rPET Promotional Items?

One question you might be left with is whether rPET is all it's cracked up to be or not. Is it truly a good use of PET that has been discarded, or is it just another way to make it look like a company is being green when they aren't? To answer that, let's talk about the pros and cons of rPET.

rPET is more environmentally friendly than virgin PET. Extracting crude oil from the ground is a horrendously environmentally devastating process, and that's before you even look at things like fracking. Then, the several-step process of turning crude oil into PET involves a lot of reactions and causes a lot of byproducts.

In contrast, taking existing PET and grinding it down, melting it, and reusing it is much more sustainable. It saves as much as 75% on energy expenditures in making it. It dramatically reduces CO2 emissions from production. It uses 90% less water in production than virgin PET. And, in many cases, rPET items are long-term reusable, compared to one-use plastic bottles and other virgin PET uses that are just discarded.

The creation of rPET and rPET-derived items also creates a lot of jobs around the world, from the "plastic picking" jobs and cleanup jobs to sorting to handling the machines that produce the rPET to everything involved in creating the final products.

rPET can be re-recycled indefinitely. When you're done with an rPET item, there's a pretty good chance it can be recycled itself. This is easiest with 100% rPET items, but even combination items like 50/50 rPET/cotton items can be recycled. There's not much in the way of loss in the recycling process, so rPET can be recycled on and on. After all, if it's going to take hundreds of years to degrade, we might as well keep reusing the material for hundreds of years, right?

rPET encourages the cleaning up of plastic contamination around the world, especially from the oceans. The "great Pacific garbage patch" is made up of a lot of PET, among other things. PET detritus washes up on shores constantly and can be found in every square meter of land everywhere on the planet by now. Since PET can be recycled, many of the companies producing rPET now pay for supplies of PET to recycle, which means people are further encouraged both to recycle and to proactively clean up their local areas and the oceans to sell that PET and get it recycled.

rPET is cheaper than other green materials with similar properties. There are loads of other neo-materials, ranging from bamboo to mushrooms to cellulose products to alternative fibers. Many of these aren't scalable or aren't capable of being mass-produced on the levels of PET or rPET, which means, in general, that rPET is a lot cheaper to purchase and use than these other materials. It's true that virgin PET is cheaper than rPET, but rPET is still a lot cheaper than neo-materials.

Many people like to know that they're supporting environmentally friendly processes rather than more destructive processes. It might not be the most tangible benefit, but when you're a business using rPET items as promotional items, you can use the fact that it's recycled material to promote it. People who are more environmentally conscious are more likely to support and approve of recycled materials, so you gain some business benefit from rPET that you don't get with less wholesome materials.

What Are the Drawbacks of rPET Promotional Items?

Unfortunately, there are still a few drawbacks to using rPET in general.

The plastic doesn't really go away. Unfortunately, recycling can only do so much to remove plastic from the environment. There's always going to be some loss, some that ends up in landfills, and some that is just discarded into the environment. We can reduce how much more virgin plastic we create, but there's only so much we can do to get rid of existing plastic, and the ways we can do it aren't environmentally friendly at scale yet. It's an area of active research, though, and some promising ideas have been developed.

Saying rPET is "infinitely recyclable" isn't quite true. Each time PET is recycled, it degrades, is slightly contaminated, or loses some structure. The more it is recycled, the harder it is to re-recycle it. This means that rPET functionally has a lifespan, after which it can't be recycled anymore. It's better, again, than more and more virgin PET, but it's not a miracle.

Natural fibers are still better on almost every axis. While rPET is better than virgin PET, things like hemp, organic cotton, and wool are still better in terms of energy use, water use, sustainability, and more.

Fiber products made of rPET are responsible for a significant proportion of environmental microplastics. One of the two most significant drawbacks to rPET is that it's broadly responsible for most of the world's microplastics. When you think of microplastics, you might be thinking of small but visible pieces of plastic in the environment, but microplastics are actually microscopic bits.

One of the most significant sources of microplastics is PET and rPET fabrics, which shed microscopic bits of fibers every time you wash them. Those microplastics are carried away with the dirty water flushed out of your machine and are processed right into the water supply. We don't really have a good way to deal with microplastics, and they've saturated every corner of the planet, which is something we as a society will have to contend with in very short order.

Many of the jobs involved in making rPET, especially in developing nations, are very exploitative. If you look into how PET is recycled, you can find many videos of people in places like India climbing mountains of discarded plastics, crawling barefoot and barehanded through contaminated trash to pick out bottles, people operating heavy machines and handling molten plastic with nearly no PPE, no masks while plastic is shredded, and more. It's terribly exploitative.

For what it's worth, not all rPET is made this way. We take great pains to source more ethically produced rPET for the products we use it in, for example. If you have questions, feel free to reach out; we keep receipts.

Should You Care About rPET Promotional Items?

At the end of the day, is rPET the best option for ethical material for your promotional items? Should you care about it?

It all depends on the angle from which you're approaching.

If you're using promotional items made from virgin PET or other unsustainable materials, switching to rPET is a great option. It helps reduce the demand for virgin PET, helps reduce the amount of new PET added to the environment, and reduces the need for harvesting more petroleum from the ground.

On the other hand, if you're not currently using promotional items, or if the promotional items you currently use are already made with sustainable materials, investing in rPET probably isn't the way to go. Instead, look into more sustainable and organic materials like hemp, organic cotton, and bamboo. There are better options than rPET; recycled plastic is just a good step on the path to sustainability.