Recycled Zippers
What are recycled zippers?
The three types of commonly used zippers in the fashion industry are generally referred to as Coil, Plastic and Metal. Each zipper type makes use of polyester yarns which are woven to produce standard zipper tapes.
Polyester is a term used to describe the fibre from which polyester yarns are made and is also used in the monofilament extrusion process that make the teeth on coil zippers.
The chemical name for polyester is polyethylene terephthalate, or PET for short. Unlike certain types of plastics, PET can be recycled either through the hydrolysation process for re-polymerisation, or by breaking down waste PET, such as that used in the production of plastic bottles, into flakes and then granulised for further processing back into yarns, which in turn can be used to weave zipper tapes or re-used for monofilament extrusion.
A recycled zipper is not a zipper that’s been recycled, it’s a zipper that has been produced from recycled materials!
The Recycling Process
Recycling PET for Coil Zippers & Zip Tapes
Recycled Monofilament
≥64% post consumer recycled PET for monofilament used for teeth element production on coil zippers gauges #3 and #5 coil gauge zippers.
Recycled Zipper Tapes
≥51% recycled DTY (Draw Textured Yarn) from post consumer PET for the zippers tapes, available for coil, metal and plastic zipper gauges #3, #45YG, #4YG, #5 and #5YG. GRS Certificate is available for traceability.
Recycling POM for Plastic Zippers
Polyoxymethylene (POM) Recycling
Up to 30% Recycled POM for zipper teeth elements. Injection sprues created during the manufacturing process are reground and reused on same batch orders. We tend not to use recycled POM across different production batches due to the colour shade variations, however we will re-use waste POM if colour matching is not critical, i.e. for outdoor tenting, boat covers etc (performed onsite).
Recycling Zinc for Sliders and Pullers
Zinc Recycling
Up to 30% recycled zinc zamac on all gauges of zippers used for slider die-casting and puller die-casting (performed onsite).
Global Recycled Standard (GRS)
The materials used to make our recycled zippers have been certified according to the Global Recycled Standard and our recycled zippers are supplied with the relevant Transaction Certificate (TC). Please note only zippers tapes are currently certified under GRS. If you would like to know more about our recycled zippers, please contact us.