9 companies you didn't know use recycled water bottles in their products — from little-known startups to giants like Nike and Adidas
The Insider Picks team writes about stuff we think you'll like. Business Insider has affiliate partnerships, so we get a share of the revenue from your purchase.
If you’ve ever bought a plastic water bottle, you probably only spent about five minutes with it — buying, drinking, and discarding. If you felt guilty enough to reuse it, the relationship might span a couple of days.
But the lifespan of one water bottle isn’t five minutes, a couple of days, or even a couple of years. Since its popularization in the 1950s, virtually every piece of plastic ever made still exists in some shape or form — unless it's been incinerated. So, even though you only spent five minutes with it, that water bottle will outlive you, your children, and your children’s children as it decomposes over the next 400+ years.
This fact gets a little more concerning when you consider that we sell about one million plastic bottles every minute — and, while we can recycle them, we almost never do.
Thankfully, social consciousness is spurring new eco-centric trends in individuals, communities, and on a global scale in a range of industries: from major companies like Starbucks pledging to nix plastic straws to high-profile collaborations between conservation organizations like Parley for the Oceans and footwear giant Adidas.
While one person opting to carry around a reusable water bottle can make a small difference, eco-friendly production on an international scale has its own exponential impact — helping to shape the future of the market itself and altering its own massive footprint in the present. Re-using something as available as plastic water bottles lessens our dependence on petroleum, curbs discards, reduces toxic emissions from incinerators, diverts waste from landfills, and, of course, requires fewer resources overall to be made — so that one-time purchase of a water bottle may stay useful, and stay in circulation, for many years to come.
Below are 9 such companies making great stuff out of recycled water bottles:
Adidas x Parley
AdidasShop Parley shoes and apparel at Adidas here
Read our reviews of the Ultra Boost Parley shoes and the outdoor collection here
Parley for the Oceans is an organization dedicated to addressing the threats against our oceans. In a well-known collaboration with Adidas, the thought leader and footwear giant created a line of Adidas Ultra Boost Parley shoes that fuse performance-oriented footwear and sustainable, progressive materials which has since expanded into apparel. Each shoe repurposes approximately 11 plastic bottles intercepted before they could enter the ocean. The colorways mimic the environments they seek to protect — seafoam blues, deep greens, and a spectrum of navy.
Adidas' goal is to phase recycled plastic into all of its shoes by 2020.
Girlfriend Collective
Girlfriend Collective InstagramShop Girlfriend Collective here
Read our review of Girlfriend Collective Classic Compression Leggings, Cupro T-shirts, and LITE leggings here
Girlfriend Collective is an up-and-coming athleisure company that's committed to making its clothes out of sustainable materials and through ethical processes. The company initially gained buzz for giving away free leggings over the internet as part of its debut. Years later, the original leggings are just as popular for their hyper-flattering compression, elongating seams, and low cost. The originals are also made from 25 recycled water bottles each.
The company also issued comfortable, airy t-shirts made from Cupro, a fabric made from cotton linter that's soft, silky, and essentially waste from the cotton industry.
More recently, Girlfriend Collective released a lightweight, workout-friendly line of clothes made from recycled fishing nets (the ocean's biggest pollutant) called the LITE collection.
Patagonia
PatagoniaShop the Patagonia recycled polyester clothing here
Read our review of the Women's Refugio backpack here
Patagonia has been making recycled polyester from plastic soda bottles since 1993, making it the first outdoor clothing manufacturer to turn trash into fleece, according to the company.
Now, the company makes its recycled polyester fibers from a blend of used soda bottles, unusable manufacturing waste, and worn-out garments (including Patagonia garments).
The recycled polyester can be found in a wide range of Patagonia's clothing, ranging from packs to t-shirts to winter weather gear.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
See Also:
- The 27 most Instagrammed sneakers in the world — and where you can buy them online
- Citi has issued a rare increase to the ThankYou Premier card's sign-up bonus — it's currently 10,000 points more than usual
- An eco-friendly footwear startup is turning plastic bottles into beautiful sneakers — each pair diverts 17 plastic bottles from landfills and rolls up to the size of a pair of socks