How Eight Plastic Bottles Become a Pair of Board Shorts
One pair of Skwosh eco board shorts is made from roughly eight recycled plastic bottles. The bottles are shredded into flakes, melted into pellets, spun into yarn and woven into fabric. The result performs the same as virgin polyester, because chemically it is the same thing.
How it is actually made
Recycled polyester, usually labelled rPET, starts as post-consumer PET plastic: drink bottles, mostly. The process runs roughly like this:
- Bottles are collected, sorted by colour and washed.
- They are shredded into small flakes and the labels and caps are separated out.
- The flakes are melted and extruded into pellets.
- The pellets are melted again and spun through a spinneret into filament yarn.
- The yarn is knitted or woven into fabric and dyed.
The useful thing about PET is that it survives this. Melting and respinning it does not meaningfully change the polymer, so the fabric at the end behaves like polyester made from virgin petroleum. For swimwear that matters, because the properties you want are exactly polyester's properties: it does not absorb much water, it dries fast, it holds a printed colour, and it does not stretch out when wet.
What it does and does not solve
Being straight about this is worth more than overselling it. Recycled polyester means less virgin petroleum pulled out of the ground for a given metre of fabric, and it diverts bottles from landfill. Those are real.
What it does not solve: it is still a plastic, it still sheds microfibres in the wash, and it is still difficult to recycle again at end of life because blended garments are hard to separate. Anyone telling you a recycled polyester short is a solved problem is selling something.
The practical thing you can do about the microfibre part is wash less often and wash cold. A rinse in fresh water after swimming does most of the work of a wash cycle anyway.
Why we use it in board shorts specifically
Swimwear is one of the categories where recycled polyester is an easy call rather than a compromise. A natural fibre would be the wrong material here: cotton board shorts hold water, stay heavy, and sag. The fabric needs to be synthetic, so the question becomes which synthetic, and recycled is the better version of the one you were going to use anyway.
Our mens board shorts and kids board shorts use a 100% recycled polyester outer with a polyester mesh brief. They are quick-drying, hold the hand-drawn prints properly, and are built to survive a few summers rather than one.
Making them last is the main thing
The most sustainable pair of boardies is the one you do not replace. Rinse them in fresh water after swimming to get the salt and chlorine out, wash cold, and hang them in the shade rather than putting them through a dryer. Heat is what finishes swimwear off, not the swimming.