Photo Friday | Recycled American Flags

With today being Veterans Day, I think it's appropriate to share an amazing product I came across earlier this year on social media: American flags made with recycled plastic bottles.

RePatriot Flag is a company, started by veteran Sam Russo, that sells three sizes of American flags, all made with recycled polyester material called REPREVE. All of the flags are produced in the United States.

Photo: RePatriot Flag

On average, 15 plastic bottles are recycled into each US flag. To date, RePatriot Flag has produced more than 3,000 3’x5’ American flags, recycling nearly 30,000 plastic bottles that were collected from curbside bins.

How does the process work?

Graphic by RePatriot/REPREVE

Plastic water and soft drink bottles are made of PET, or polyethylene terephthalate. Over the years, REPREVE has fine-tuned a proprietary process that breaks the bottles down into flakes, then transforms PET bottle flakes into REPREVE fiber, which is then used in thousands of different fabrics and products available globally.

RePatriot works with REPREVE to turn the fiber into the base yarn for the flags. The yarn is woven into fabric, dyed red, white and blue, and manufactured into the US flag.

As REPREVE points out:
Did you know 6 recycled plastic bottles makes a shirt? Also, 50 recycled plastic bottles makes a fleece jacket. Every year, millions of plastic bottles are not recycled and end up in landfills that impact our environment. These bottles will sit there for hundreds of years, as they will not disintegrate. So next time, make the smart throw and toss your plastic bottles in the recycle bin, not the trash can, so they can be recycled into something more.

So although the common mentality is to throw something away when you're done with it, think about the life of that plastic bottle before you throw it out (or, shudder, litter it). Your items may no longer be useful to you, but they are very useful in some capacity.

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