How much does it cost to make something out of recycled materials?

[BalloonSlayer]

Had an email from Uniqlo about their fleeces made from recycled plastic bottles.

Could do with a new fleece so had a look and they were £38 !!

Given that the 'raw material' is either free or very inexpensive (unlike, say, cotton), is it extremely expensive to turn the bottles into fleece? Or are they attempting to fleece the customers? (see what I did there?)

Would genuinely like to know. Grateful for any manufacturing experts who can shed light on this. Could do with Aunty Mabel or Play School to show me how it's done.

First you're forgetting the research and design which will go into deciding whether or not this is feasible.

Then, you have to sort the materials, clean the materials, then you have to process them into fibres you can weave into clothes, then you have to make the clothes, then you have to do quality checks, then they have to be packed, then they have to be shipped (internationally, most likely), then they have to rent warehouses or shops to sell them from, and employ staff to sell / pack.

£38 seems quite cheap tbh for all that.

The research and design was done years ago though.

And all the rest applies for cotton doesn't it? Of course it must be more difficult to make a top from a bottle than a tuft of cotton, but I wondered how much more it costs.

But also brands will have different price points.
You can go to primark who are now making clothes from recycled materials and probably get a fleece for 10 pounds. However it will probably fall apart in a few washes whereas uniqlo in my experience and the clothes I've got from from them I've had for years so are higher quality so you get what you pay for .

Well, the bottle has to be cleaned then shredded then spun into yarn and made into fabric then made into a garment so not free. The process is shown here www.toadandco.com/blogs/blog/how-to-make-fabric-from-recycled-plastic-bottles

Very interesting! I get what you mean though, there should probably be a subsidy for using recycled materials, but then there's the microplastics problem that I admit to knowing nothing about. Off to Google some more....

Reusing clothes is the most environmentally friendly thing I'd guess?

"The research and design was done years ago though."
It still has to be paid for through the final product though.
When I wrote computer software it might take 2 years to write a programme during which time I wasn't paid at all. It might have only taken me 10mins to copy it onto a cd and post it out once it was written but I still had two years worth of wages to recoup.

Clothes shouldn’t be cheap, though. People make them, they have to be paid a living wage and work in safe conditions. And we should all be buying fewer, better-quality clothes that last longer – recycling to create fabric, and then making and transporting the clothes, takes energy, and most energy is still from fossil fuel. Recycled fabric isn’t a panacea.

Caveat obviously that we also need to rage wages universally and address the cost of living and particularly housing, so everyone can afford to make the choice to buy fewer, better clothes, and that Primark, while problematic, serves a purpose.

So the person who came up with the technology to do this may have a patent and be getting royalties? Hope so as v clever and useful.

There was something else I was looking at the other day that made me feel the same. Recycled materials, eye watering prices. Not sure what it was, might have been the posh laptop backpack thread. Must try and find it to check.