The World Cup has finally started and every journalist who doesn’t cover sports is looking for a story angle. What is it for circularity in plastics?
Nike’s new federation kits are made from 100% textile waste, shifting the recycled-content story in football shirts from PET bottles to textile-to-textile recycling.
Recycled polyester is not news in football kits. In the 2010 World Cup, Nike launched team shirts made of polyester recycled from PET bottles. Since then major sportswear brands have produced kits made of recycled plastics.
What’s new is the feedstock source—shifting from bottles to textiles—and how that’s closing the loop on textile waste. For the first time in the history of the 96-year-old tournament, Nike-sponsored teams—including favourites France, England and Brazil and two of the Cup’s hosts, the United States and Canada—will be wearing shirts made from old clothes.
Nike developed the chemically recycled fabric over three and a half years to help athletes stay cool in the hotter, more humid conditions expected during the tournament. Nike told the Financial Times that the material “performs and gets us to a really close virgin [polyester] quality that we think could be a game-changer for the industry, as well as for the sport.”
Plastic-based textiles make up about 60% of textiles in Europe, where each consumer discards about 16 kg of textile waste annually but less than 1% is recycled back into new clothing.
Nike’s fabric is produced by depolymerising PET from discarded textiles and polymerising the resulting monomers back into polyester which is then spun into yarn engineered to improve air flow.
Chemical recycling is the main technology being developed for polyester textile-to-textile recycling because it can, in principle, return PET to virgin-like quality. Still, blended fabrics present a significant challenge. Nike says not everything it designs can be chemically recycled and acknowledges that some elements of its kits, including trims and badges not made from polyester, are still sourced conventionally.
The company’s Aero-FIT performance cooling technology leverages computational design and a highly specialised, stitch-specific knitting process to help athletes stay cool in the extreme conditions anticipated throughout this summer’s tournament. The design has its faults—a bulge along the shoulder seam—although it’s not obvious if that is at all related to the recycled material.
While Nike has moved to textiles to source feedstock for its recycled kits, competitors Adidas and Puma are still mostly using recycled polyester sourced from bottles. Adidas aims to use 10% of closed-loop recycled textiles in its products by 2030. This World Cup, Puma’s fan replica shirts are made from at least 95% recycled polyester from textile waste through its Re:Fibre programme. On-pitch circularity, at least for teams like Portugal, remains a match for another tournament.
Source: https://www.plasticsnews.com/