Recycled Custom Sportswear – Diverting single use plastic bottles from landfill

When it comes to sustainability, more often than not the focus is on retailers and fashion brands, with brands like Nike already making use of recycled plastic in a big way. However, we’re striving to fix the same problems by focusing on the millions of branded clothing products produced every year for workwear, uniforms, sporting events & promotions.

35.8 million plastic bottles are consumed in the UK alone every day. Additionally, polyester is one of the fastest growing fashion categories, with synthetic fibres currently making up about 60% of the material used in clothing worldwide. 

At A.M. Custom Clothing, we find statistics like these very alarming. Despite the world turning it’s back on single use plastics, the use of plastic in clothing continues to grow faster than any other material. While we endeavour to educate our customers that polyester isn’t the best choice for the environment, we’ve become acutely aware that in some circumstances it can be the only option for them (if you’ve tried running an OCR with a cotton hoodie in winter you’ll fully appreciate this!). When it is essential we want to ensure we’re offering the most innovative options, alongside diverting plastic from landfill.

With this in mind, we have worked to launch a range of sportswear made from recycled plastic bottles. 

Recycled polyester is an incredible innovation for recycling plastic bottles, and another step closer to resolving the plastic crisis. However, from an environmental perspective, it’s not 100% perfect and is by no means a silver bullet. Microplastics are one of the unavoidable issues with ANY form of sportswear made from synthetic materials, recycled or otherwise (polyester, nylon, acrylic etc). 

It takes 5-6 plastic bottles to make one of our RPET recycled technical t-shirts or running vests. As a result of this innovation our fabric suppliers have recycled 14.2 billion plastic bottles so far, alongside avoiding 385 million kilograms of CO2.

Through pioneering Qwick-Dri™ technology combined with a super-flyweight composition, we’ve been able to create what has been regarded as the UK’s highest standard of recycled sportswear. 

The range includes, technical t-shirts, running vests and cycle jerseys, all of which can be custom branded to your requirements.

We aim to be as open and transparent as possible, and with that in mind, we always advise using one of our organic cotton t-shirt options, which are made from a natural material, where sportswear isn’t essential.

If it is essential, then head over to our Request A Quote form, to provide us with more details on what you need.