Recycled PET felt acoustic panels are emerging as a popular interior design choice for numerous establishments including offices, museums, theaters, restaurants, public spaces, and schools. These panels are favored for their noise reduction capabilities, while also offering an aesthetically pleasing appearance, making them essential in areas where both acoustic control and visual appeal are priorities.
PET, which stands for “Polyethylene Terephthalate,” is a widely used thermoplastic polymer resin that belongs to the polyester family. It serves various purposes such as being spun into fibers for clothing and industrial textiles, used for manufacturing containers for liquids and food products, and as a component in making engineering resins by combining it with glass fiber. One of its most visible and prevalent applications in everyday life is serving as a bottle for bottled water and soft drinks.
1. 10 plastic bottles equate to around 400grammes of polyester fibre
2. 1 ton of plastic bottles recycled saves 3.8 barrels of oil
3. 1 million plastic bottles saves around 250 barrels of oil
4. 1 million plastic bottles recycled eliminates 180 metric tons of CO2 emissions from being released into the atmosphere
5. 10% of all oil consumed is used to make plastics
6. Recycling plastic bottles takes 8timres less energy than to produce an equivalent amount of new bottles
7. In America alone the supply of plastic bottles that are consumed each year requires 47 million barrels of oil and releases 450 million kilos of CO2 into the atmosphere
The recycling process begins when you place a PET bottle into a recycling bin. At the recycling facility, the bottles are sorted based on their chemical composition and baled together. Some bottles might be made from HDPE, which is used for items like household and kitchenware, carrier bags, and food wrapping. However, for our discussion, we’ll focus on items made from PET, such as water bottles, soft and fizzy drink bottles, pots, tubs, oven-ready trays, and sometimes jam jars.
After being compressed into large bales, the bottles are transported to a PET reclaiming facility. There, the bottles are thoroughly cleaned, and their caps and labels are removed. The cleaned bottles are then fed into a grinder, where they are reduced to flakes. These flakes are heated in hot air to form a hard outer coating and then dried to remove any remaining moisture. Next, the flakes are melted and forced through a machine die with micro-holes to create fine filaments, which harden and are then entangled using a spinneret to form yarn. This yarn can be spooled and stretched to align the molecules, providing strength and flexibility.
Felt production involves blending the recycled PET fiber with virgin polyester fiber, typically with a minimum of 60% recycled PET. This pre-felt is layered and passed through heated rollers to combine the fibers. Heated platens then compress the mat to form a sheet, which is trimmed to size. While current PET felt manufacturing technology often doesn’t use 100% recycled product, the felt sheet can be recycled again through shredding, grinding, melting, and extruding. However, with each recycling process, the quality of the product may degrade, reducing the amount of usable fiber recovered.
