Eco-Friendly Wall Fabrics Made from Recycled Plastic Bottles

Our New Sustainable Display Fabric

We’ve been printing tensioned fabric graphics for many years. They are made from polyester which can be recycled to create a closed loop system. Great! Now we’ve gone one step further and have a new fabric product that is made from 100% recycled plastic bottles!

We are delighted that we can offer this product and do our bit, steering harmful plastics away from the oceans and transforming them into fabulously vibrant wall graphics for your office, retail or leisure space. In fact, for every square metre of sustainable wall fabric we print, we are actually printing to about twelve recycled plastic bottles.

The fabric itself looks and feels like our regular polyester display fabrics so you can be assured that none of our outstanding quality and detail will be lost. Plus, it is PVC free which allows our sustainable wall fabrics to tick another box on your eco graphics wish-list. This innovative new recycled fabric joins our wide range of sustainable products such as our eco lightbox fabrics and eco one-piece wallpaper, also both made from 100% recycled bottles.

Every roll of Eco Fabric uses 3,000 plastic bottles

Every day millions of plastic bottles are being thrown into landfill, however, those bottles are a viable, eco-friendly and sustainable resource! Using recycled plastics to create eye-catching display graphics is both innovative and responsible. With every metre of recycled fabric that we print, we are reducing what would have become landfill waste. We encourage our clients to help us make a difference and use this innovative Eco Fabric Product for the next project.

The Benefits of Recycling Plastic Bottles

Plastic is an amazing product. It’s durable, waterproof and can be moulded to almost any shape. When this versatile polymer was invented, it was never intended to be disposable. Plastic’s cost-effective credentials and a lack of environmental foresight is now a problem. Plastic bottles are not going to biodegrade any time soon, so recycling them into something new is a fantastic solution for many reasons:

• Durable
• Light weight
• Compared to growing cotton, recycling plastic process is quicker, requires little energy and uses hardly any water
• Just eight plastic bottles make 1kg of polyester fabric that avoided becoming landfill or ocean waste
• It can be recycled again in the future.

The Recycling Process

You’re not the only one wondering how a bottle becomes a part of our wonderful recycled fabric graphics. Turning waste plastic bottles into recycled polyester, ready to be printed is a clever process. Plastic bottles would often find their way into landfill or the ocean, and take thousands of years to biodegrade. Recycling them into polyester fabric is a great way to repurpose them and will be enjoyed for much longer than it took to use the bottle itself. Here’s an overview of the recycling process in five steps:

Baling. Empty plastic bottle are crushed and baled at a recycling plant and moved the the manufacturing plant. Here, they’re vibrated at super-speed to sort them.

Grinding. The separated bottles are ground down into flakes.

Pelletising. The flakes are first washed and dried to removed any excess fluid, labels or caps and are then turned into small plastic pellets using a specialist vented extruder.

Spinning. These pellets are transported to the yarn manufacturing facility where they are melted down and spun into polyester.

Weaving. The yarn is finally woven into polyester fabric and mounted onto rolls which we print onto using our dye-sublimation printer!

Did you know…?

Only 9% of the Earth’s plastic has been recycled. Every time you choose our recycled fabric instead of virgin polyester, you’re diverting plastic away from landfill and oceans.

Humans currently produce more than 350 million metric tons of plastic waste per year. Without changes to current policies, global plastic waste generation is projected to triple by 2060, to a staggering one billion metric tons.

Plastic production has sharply increased over the last 70 years. In 1950, the world produced just two million tonnes. In 2019, 460 million tonnes were produced. Using our Eco-friendly, recycled fabric will help lower this astonishing figure.

Our sustainable graphics and more…

If you want to learn more about our recycled products and discover tips for planning a more sustainable graphics project, you can download our handy eco-friendly guide ‘Plan it for the Planet’. Why not take a look at the full range of sustainable graphic solutions from wall graphics, floor graphics and signage systems on our Eco Graphics page.

Get in touch

If you have any questions or would like to use this incredible new product for your next project, give our team a call on 01332 613 900 or email us at ideas@mxdisplay.co.uk