5000 employees of Bisleri across India will be wearing recycled PET uniforms
Bisleri that aims to educate citizens about the importance of recycling and up cycling plastichave made uniforms for their sales team from used pet bottles. A great initiative to create sustainable fabrics, these Shirts are crafted from threads derived entirely from recycled bottles. Across India, 5,000 employees are presentlywearingthese uniforms, upholding the vision of sustainability.
Plastic bottles are still thought to be a threat to the environment but in reality they are not. With the help of advanced technology, bottles can be transformed into clothing. The idea behind the initiative was to practice what Bisleri preaches that PET bottles post use are not waste. They are valuable, in fact where old newspaper fetches Rs 6 to Rs 8 per kg where single use PET bottles fetches a value of Rs 15/- per kg post use. It’s a misconceptions that bottles lies in the dump yard to become landfill. Water bottles are like gold among all packaging materials. Currently in India 90% of all PET is recycled for making yarn, t shirts, shirts etc. Bisleri through their bottles for change initiative collected millions of bottles and around ten lakhs bottles were used to make uniform for all staff of Bisleri.
The process of making recycled Shirts:
With the development in the recycling & up cycling technology, the collected bottles were directly sent to the recycler. The plastic bottles were crushed and converted into flakes. The flakes were converted to fibre in the conversion machine.Pet fibres are dyed in the required shades and mixed with cotton for shirting & with viscose for trousers. It took 40 bottles to make a shirt and around 45 bottles to make a trouser.After mixing, the fibre is converted into yarn on the ring frame spinning machine.Once the yarn is ready, it is converted into fabric through weaving process on rapier & air jet looms. Once weaving is completed the fabric is then sent for washing and final processing. It is moved to the tailoring unit for stitching the final uniform.
On the announcement of up cycled clothing, Anjana Ghosh, Director Marketing and OSR, Bisleri international says, “People hate plastic because they are not aware about the feats of recycling. It’s a huge misconception that water bottles add to the environmental pollutions. In fact in India we have a robust recycling industry, which produces high value fabric, shoes and other products from PET bottles. We thought we should practice what we preach that “plastics are not waste.” Hence our entire staff across India are proudly to burst the myths around plastics. 5000 employees will flaunt their uniforms proudly made from our own plastic bottles.”
ABOUT BOTTLES FOR CHANGE
Bottles for Change aims to create the awareness among citizens about importance of plastic recycling. When plastic is thrown in waste, people also throw plastic in sea, ocean, drains, river etc. and causes pollution, so don’t treat plastic as waste, it has value even after use, just clean it, collect it and send it directly for recycling.
Through this initiative we ensure channelizing all kinds of used clean plastic for recycling thus ensuring the greener cleaner environment
Bisleri has engaged with an NGO called Parisar Bhagni Vikas Sangh (PBVS), a social enterprise Sampurna Earth in Mumbai and recycler Dalmia Polypro Industries Ltd., which are associated with the plastic agents/kabadiwala groups in Mumbai. The plastic collected by us are crushed into fine flakes which are then used to create non-edible products such as – Cloth fabric, Hand bags, Window blinds and other useful products.
