When I first started sourcing lining materials for THE PLIÉ, rPET came up almost immediately. It’s on every sustainable material shortlist. Suppliers mention it readily. Brand marketing loves it. And on paper, the logic is clean: plastic bottles get diverted from landfill, melted down, spun into fiber, and turned into fabric. A waste problem becomes a textile. What’s not to like?

The more I looked into it, the more complicated the answer became. Not because rPET is a bad material — it isn’t. But because the label “recycled polyester” covers a wide range of realities, and treating them as equivalent is one of the cleaner examples of greenwashing I’ve run into in this process.

What rPET actually is

rPET stands for recycled polyethylene terephthalate. PET is one of the most common plastics in the world — it’s what most single-use water bottles and food containers are made from. When those bottles are collected, sorted, cleaned, shredded into flake, melted, and extruded into fiber, the resulting material is rPET. That fiber can be spun into yarn and woven or knit into fabric.

The basic environmental case for rPET is real. Producing recycled polyester uses significantly less energy than producing virgin polyester from petroleum — estimates range from 30% to 50% less, depending on the source and methodology. It also keeps plastic out of landfill and, in theory, out of the ocean. These are genuine benefits, not marketing inventions.

But the story doesn’t end there.

The collection problem

Most rPET fabric is made from post-consumer PET bottles, not from old garments. This is partly because bottle-grade PET is easier to sort and clean at scale. Garments are harder — they’re often blended with other fibers, dyed with chemicals that complicate the recycling process, and collected less reliably than bottles. The result is that the fashion industry’s recycling infrastructure mostly runs on bottles, not on closing the loop on its own textile waste.

This matters because it means rPET doesn’t actually solve the problem of what happens to garments at end of life. A bag made from rPET lining will eventually reach the end of its life, and the lining is unlikely to be recyclable through any widely available process. The bottle has been rescued from waste, but the textile downstream of it has not necessarily created a more circular system.

The microplastic question

This is the part that gave me the most pause when I was doing my research. Synthetic textiles — including rPET — shed microplastic fibers when they’re washed. Studies suggest that a single wash cycle can release hundreds of thousands of synthetic microfibers into wastewater. Most wastewater treatment facilities capture a significant percentage of these, but not all of them, and the ones that escape enter waterways and eventually oceans.

For a bag lining, the wash-cycle concern is less acute than it would be for a garment you launder regularly. But it’s not zero. And more broadly, it points to a tension at the heart of recycled synthetics: the material benefits from not being virgin plastic, but it’s still plastic, with all of the downstream concerns plastic carries.

The label “recycled polyester” covers a wide range of realities. Treating them as equivalent is one of the cleaner examples of greenwashing I’ve run into.

What I look for when sourcing rPET

After going through this research, I didn’t stop considering rPET for THE PLIÉ — but I got more specific about what I was looking for. A few things I now ask suppliers directly:

• GRS certification. The Global Recycled Standard (GRS) is a third-party certification that verifies the recycled content claim and tracks chain of custody from input material through to finished fabric. It’s not perfect, but it’s meaningfully better than a self-declared “recycled” claim. I won’t use a supplier who can’t provide documentation.
• Recycled content percentage. A fabric labeled “recycled” might be 30% recycled content and 70% virgin. That’s a different product than one that’s 100% rPET. I ask for the exact breakdown.
• Source material. Bottle-grade PET is more traceable than textile-grade. Some suppliers can tell you where their input material comes from geographically; others can’t. More traceability is always better.
• Finish and treatment. Some rPET fabrics are coated with PFC-based water repellents, which create their own environmental problems. If a lining fabric has a coating, I want to know what it is.

Where rPET fits in THE PLIÉ

For the interiors of THE PLIÉ bags, I’m currently using a GRS-certified rPET lining from a supplier in Taiwan who can document chain of custody to the input material. It’s not a perfect solution — no material is — but it’s a substantiated one, which is the most I can honestly claim.

I’m also watching the development of textile-to-textile recycling systems with a lot of interest. Companies like Renewlane and Worn Again Technologies are working on chemical recycling processes that can break down blended textiles into their component polymers and reuse them. If those processes reach commercial scale, the case for recycled synthetics gets considerably stronger. We’re not there yet, but the direction is right.

For now, rPET is one of several tools I use — not a solution I rely on, and not a claim I make without the documentation to back it up.

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