Fashionable and recycled

	Bottlegloves - the gloves are made from recycled PET, which was originally used to make the bottles. The young lady is Nakano. Credit: North News and Pictures.

You might soon see recycled plastic water bottles on the catwalks if an effort to alleviate the landfill crisis becomes fashionable.

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) has so far only found limited use even among the more extravagant and eccentric extremes of the fashion industry, but Northumbria University graduate student Yukie Nakano is hoping to change all that in a bid to reduce the amount of waste materials destined for landfill. Nakano is investigating the potential barriers to using recycled polymers in textile products and is experimenting with recycled plastic to produce new types of visually enhanced fabrics, such as knitting yarns.

	Click image to enlarge view.

"PET is fairly easy to recycle," explains Nakano, "and can be made into flakes which can then be spun as a yarn." She is hoping to find an easy method for converting raw fibre into texturally rich yarn. We may yet see an environmentally friendly fashion industry. Although don't hold your breath waiting to see brown corduroy and leather elbow patches on the catwalks.