Recycled polyester: is fleece made from bottles better?

The pitch is irresistible. Somewhere a plastic bottle was heading for landfill or the sea, and now it’s a cosy zip-up keeping you warm on a hike. Waste in, jacket out, everyone wins.

Some of that is true. Making fibre from bottles really does use less energy than making it from oil. But the jacket is still made of plastic, it still sheds, and the bottle has made a trip it usually can’t come back from. Here’s what the evidence says, including where it’s thin.

What recycled polyester is

Recycled polyester, often sold as rPET, is the same plastic as a drinks bottle: polyethylene terephthalate. A bottle is moulded PET and a fleece is spun PET. Our guide to plastic resin codes covers PET as a material.

Bottles are collected, sorted and either melted and re-spun into fibre (mechanical recycling) or broken down chemically and rebuilt, the routes compared in a 2010 life-cycle study. Either way, the result is polyester. “Recycled” tells you where the plastic came from. It doesn’t make it any less plastic.

It’s a big business, but a small slice of all polyester. Textile Exchange, an industry nonprofit that tracks fibre markets, reported that recycled polyester rose to about 9.3 million tonnes in 2024, but its share of all polyester slipped from 12.5% to 12%, because virgin polyester grew faster. Polyester overall was 78 million tonnes, 59% of all fibre made. For every tonne of recycled polyester, the industry made roughly seven tonnes of new polyester from fossil fuels.

Where recycled polyester comes from

Mostly from bottles, not from old clothes. Textile Exchange estimates that around 98% of recycled polyester came from plastic bottles. By its count, bottle-based polyester was 6.9% of all the fibre produced worldwide in 2024, while less than 1% came from recycled textiles of any kind.

That matters because a clear PET bottle is one of the few pieces of plastic packaging that can be recycled back into the same thing. Bottlers want it. EU law requires PET drink bottles to contain at least 25% recycled plastic on average from 2025, and all drink bottles at least 30% from 2030, averaged across each country’s market. In the US and Canada, the share of recycled PET that went back into bottles reached 59% in 2023, according to the PET industry’s trade group. The rest went into other products, fibre among them.

Does a fleece take a bottle out of the bottle loop?

The European Commission thinks so. Its 2022 textiles strategy calls the accuracy of green claims about clothes made from recycled polymers “a specific source of growing concern” when the polymers come not from fibre-to-fibre recycling “but in particular from sorted PET bottles”. It says the practice is “not in line with the circular model for PET bottles”, which can be kept in a closed food-contact loop, and it encourages businesses to put their effort into recycling clothes into clothes instead.

Drinks makers agree, which is worth knowing. A joint letter to MEPs backing the Commission’s line was signed by soft-drink, mineral-water and juice trade bodies, which need recycled PET to meet those bottle targets, alongside campaign groups including Zero Waste Europe and Changing Markets.

What we couldn’t find is a study measuring how many bottles clothing actually pulls away from bottle-to-bottle recycling. That depends on local collection, prices and whether a given batch of flake is food-grade. So the honest version is this: bottles and fleeces compete for the same material, regulators would rather the bottles stayed bottles, and nobody has put a reliable number on the trade-off.

Is recycled polyester lower-carbon than virgin?

Yes, in the life-cycle study we found. Comparing four ways of turning bottles into fibre with making fibre from new PET, researchers found recycled fibre cut non-renewable energy use by 40 to 85% and global warming impact by 25 to 75%. Mechanically recycled fibre beat virgin polyester in at least eight of nine environmental categories.

Two caveats. The wide ranges come from a genuine accounting argument: how to split the benefit of recycling between the bottle’s first life and the fibre’s second. And the study is from 2010 and measures making the fibre, not what the garment does afterwards. Lower-carbon polyester is still polyester once it’s in your wardrobe.

Does recycled polyester shed more microfibres?

Probably somewhat more, on current evidence, but the evidence is small. Every polyester garment sheds; our guide to synthetic clothes and microplastics covers how much, where it goes and what helps. The question here is whether recycled fibre is worse.

Lab studies comparing recycled and virgin polyester fabrics:

• 2.3 times more fibres. Knitted fabric made from recycled PET yarn released about 368,000 fibres per kilogram, against about 167,000 for virgin polyester, over three lab washes. The recycled fibres were also shorter.
• About 30% more. In a 2024 study simulating household washing, a recycled polyester fabric released 1,193 microplastic fibres against 908 for virgin polyester under the same conditions.
• 50% more fibre loss. Yarns made with mechanically recycled post-consumer polyester showed 50% higher fibre loss in laundering than virgin polyester.
• Worse with each round of recycling. Researchers blended 30% mechanically recycled polyester into fabric. Fibre recycled once showed no clear difference from virgin polyester in the wash, but fibre recycled two or three times shed about 4.3 and 6.2 times more. The fibres got shorter and the yarn hairier each time.
• No consistent effect. A 2020 study found 70% recycled polyester shed fewer microfibres than 40% recycled polyester, and no other significant effect of recycled content.

That’s a handful of lab studies, each on a few fabrics, with different machines and counting methods. They also test different things. Bottle flake melted and spun into new fibre isn’t the same product as old clothes shredded back into short fibres, and the authors note that much of the earlier research used fabric made from recycled bottles, which doesn’t tell you how clothes recycled into clothes will behave. A fair summary: some studies find recycled polyester sheds more, the effect looks bigger the more times the fibre has been recycled, and none of these studies found it sheds less than virgin polyester.

Fleece is a shedder whatever it’s made from. In a test of 37 textiles, mechanically treated polyester fabrics, mostly fleeces and jerseys, released six times more microfibres per wash than woven nylon. The same study found cotton and wool shed a lot too. The difference is that cotton and wool aren’t plastic.

What else comes with recycled plastic

Recycling takes in whatever was in or on the old plastic. Two recent studies looked at chemicals:

• Bisphenols. In 57 clothing samples, the median BPA level in clothes made from recycled material was 13.5 ng/g, almost twice the 7.66 ng/g in conventional clothes. BPS ran the other way. Washing reduced both. The authors estimated that skin exposure from dry clothes stayed below the European Food Safety Authority’s tolerable daily intake for BPA, but exposure from sweat-soaked clothes often went above it. That’s a calculated estimate from lab extraction, not a measurement in people. More on BPA in our bisphenols explainer.
• Other additives. A 2025 study of virgin and recycled PET bottles and PET textiles bought in the US found organophosphate esters, a family of plastic additives, more often in recycled PET, “indicating recycling as a contamination pathway”. Extracts from both kinds of PET blocked hormone receptors in cell tests, with no clear difference between virgin and recycled.

Neither study shows that wearing recycled polyester harms anyone. They show that “recycled” can mean more variety in what’s in the fibre, which is why LPP’s standards are wary of recycled plastic generally.

What happens to your fleece afterwards

For nearly all clothes, recycling ends here. The Commission’s textiles strategy says less than 1% of textile waste feeds into new textiles globally. The European Environment Agency says recycling of synthetic fibres “is not observed at scale”, and is especially hard “for both technical and economic reasons”.

Part of the reason is in the shedding study above: each round of mechanical recycling breaks the fibre into shorter pieces. And a fleece is rarely just one material: zips, elastic, labels, prints and thread are their own hidden plastics, which a garment label usually leaves out.

So a bottle that could, in principle, have become another bottle becomes a jacket, and the jacket is very unlikely to become another jacket. Whether that’s better than the bottle going to landfill directly depends on where the bottle would really have gone.

What the EU is doing (as of November 2026)

The EU is pushing clothing towards clothes-to-clothes recycling and away from vague green labels.

• Separate collection. Member states had to set up separate collection of textiles by 1 January 2025.
• Producers pay. A 2025 amendment to the EU waste law requires extended producer responsibility schemes for clothing, textiles and footwear by 17 April 2028. Brands will fund collection and recycling, with fees adjusted for design, and the law says that money should prioritise scaling up fibre-to-fibre recycling.
• Design rules to come. The same law notes that the EU’s ecodesign regulation can set binding rules for textiles on durability, recyclability and mandatory recycled fibre content. Since 19 July 2026, large companies have been barred from destroying unsold clothing and footwear.
• Vaguer claims banned. From 27 September 2026, EU consumer law blacklists generic environmental claims a trader can’t back with recognised excellent environmental performance, the “eco-friendly” and “green” kind. A specific, true statement such as “made with 50% recycled polyester” is the kind of claim the rule leaves alone, though general rules against misleading claims still apply.

None of this changes what a recycled polyester garment is. It changes who pays when it’s thrown away, and what can be said on the label.

How LPP treats recycled polyester

As synthetic, because it is. Under our standards, as of November 2026, textiles more than 5% synthetic on the fibre label are excluded, and recycled polyester counts toward that 5% just like new polyester. Regenerated cellulose fibres such as viscose and lyocell are a different case: they aren’t plastic, and we cover them separately. We also ask about thread, elastic, labels and prints, and record thread the maker won’t disclose as synthetic. Our line is “less plastic, not no plastic”, and we’ll say where plastic remains.

If you need a fleece, here’s what the evidence supports:

• The best fleece is the one you already own. Shedding falls with each wash, so new garments shed most, and every year you wear one is a year you don’t buy another.
• If you buy new synthetic, recycled is probably the lower-carbon choice. It’s still plastic, and it may shed somewhat more.
• Consider wool for warmth. It sheds, but it isn’t plastic. Check the label for synthetic blends.
• Wash it less, and colder, in full loads. Our shedding guide has the evidence on cycles and filters.
• Don’t treat “made from bottles” as a reason to buy. It tells you where the plastic came from, not where it’s going.

Common questions

Is recycled polyester plastic-free or biodegradable?

No to both. It’s the same polymer as new polyester, PET, and LPP counts it as synthetic. In lab tests, cotton and rayon fibres broke down substantially in water and sludge while polyester barely degraded, as our synthetic clothes guide explains.

Can I recycle my old fleece?

Probably not into a new fleece. Less than 1% of textile waste becomes new textiles. In the EU, textiles should now be collected separately, so use a textile bank or take-back scheme rather than the bin, but expect it to be reused, downcycled or burned. Wearing it longer or passing it on does more.

For more on clothing, see our clothing section.