From Bottle to Sweater

One minute you're drinking from it, the next you could be wearing it. Thanks to recycling technology and trade agreements between Germany and China, the ice cold bottle of fizzy drink that keeps you cool on a summer's day may eventually find its way back to you as a fleece sweater to warm you up in winter.

Since the beginning of 1993, all plastic bottles in Germany have been sorted from the rest of the country's garbage for recycling purposes. Four years ago, a security duty was added to the price of PET (Poly-Ethylen-Terephthalat) bottles in a bid to encourage more people to return them to collecting points. As a result, the amount of bottles coming back has been overwhelming. More than 800 million PET bottles are collected every year in Germany; the majority of them collected by the big supermarket chains.

But what does one do with all these bottles? Luckily, some bright spark hit on the idea of shipping the PET containers to China.

The bottles are picked up from the supermarkets by a collection company, which takes them to a facility where the bottles are dissembled into PET fragments and pressed into bales. The bales are then sold to Chinese traders at a tidy profit.

High prices still cheaper in the long run

The Chinese textile industry has an immense need for plastics. Even the high prices the Chinese must pay for the PET bales from Germany are cheaper than if the plastic was manufactured in China. The transport duties between Hamburg and Hong Kong are low and the manpower in China is cheap due to less rigid controls.

"Once in China, the PET material is melted down and made into thin thread which can be interweaved," said Sasha Schuh, manager of consultation company ASCON which deal specifically in waste economy. One pullover needs the equivalent of 16 liter bottles.

Once the garments have been made from the PET, they are shipped back to Germany where more money is made. A fleece sweater can go for anything between 50-100 euros ($). The manufacturing process costs around 32 cents.

Number one market for garbage

China's ever-expanding economy -- a growth rate of almost 10 percent a year -- makes for a country insatiable for raw materials. Such a huge country with huge demands requires much more than its resources of oil and gas can cope with. China has become a world market leader in secondary raw materials and rubbish. What used to go straight to the dump now ends up back on the shelves as a new product thanks mostly to the Chinese.

This new market has also made rubbish and raw materials more valuable. Instead of stinking garbage piles and environmentally unfriendly land fill sites, the future could see more and more high-tech factories which process waste into new products. As such, waste materials like PET have become major economic factors. And one day, throwing away trash never to see it again in some form may be a thing of the past.