With the introduction of our innovative recycled custom sportswear option for running vests, t-shirts and cycling jerseys, we thought it would be worthwhile discussing the motives behind the introduction of this fabric, and the plan going forward.
As an industry, we’re heavily involved in the production of plastic, and in particular, polyethylene terephthalate. You’ll know this as the acronym PET; a synthetic polymer. It’s used in sportswear thanks to its flexible, robust composition as well as the fact that it offers high levels of wicking and dryness.
We want to change the way we’re perceived. Not just as a company, but as an industry. That’s why we’re investing a great deal of time in developing our range of recycled sportswear options, and extending it out to other ranges. There’s work in the pipeline for an overhaul of our retail range, while we are making a number of changes at HQ and our factories to reduce our carbon footprint.
With that in mind, we wanted to reel off a couple of statistics for our recycled sportswear and the general problems we all face with our plastic consumption.
Recycled Facts
It takes five to six plastic bottles to make a Scimitar recycled running vest or technical t-shirt. That’s six bottles saved from entering our ocean or disrupting wildlife ecosystems.
Our fabric supplier has recycled over 14.2 billion bottles so far, and are aiming for 20 billion in total by 2020. By using Scimitar recycled fabric, you become part of this exciting journey towards the 20 billion benchmark.
To put it into context, 14 billion bottles are enough to go around the world seventy times if you were to lay them end to end. That’s a fair old distance – it’s 2.8 million kilometres, to be precise!
385 million kilograms of co2 have been avoided in the recycling of the 14 billion bottles so far, helping to offer a better level of air quality and to reduce the impact of CO2 on the environment and the planet.
Here’s an alarming statistic. If every running vest, technical t-shirt or cycling jersey we produced in 2018 was made from our recycled fabric, we would have been personally responsible for over 3.5 million recycled plastic bottles.
That may sound like a lot, but the scale of the problem is bigger than you think. One million plastic bottles are bought worldwide every minute.
In the UK alone, we use around 13 billion plastic bottles over the course of a year, with only 7.5 billion (57%) of these bottles being recycled after use. This is improving year on year, but is by no means the most efficient.
In Norway, bottles are sold with a small deposit that’s refunded when empties are returned. It’s funded by unclaimed deposits and levies on drinks manufacturers. The result? More than 97% of plastic bottles being recycled annually.
Help us address this problem in the sportswear sector. Opt for recycled fabric and together, we can #BreakBoundaries.
Take a look at the video below by our recycled fabric supplier, and let them show you how they take used plastic bottles and convert them into a yarn of fabric for us to use in our custom recycled sportswear.
SCIMITARSPORTS.COM/RECYCLED
