How Plastic Bottles are Recycled Into Dish Towels

“So... How Exactly Does A Plastic Bottle Become a Dish Towel?”

If you’ve landed on this page, chances are you’re wondering—and we’re so glad you asked! It’s a questions we get often, and luckily one we'll honestly never get tired of answering.

Follow along as we break down exactly how our bottles get broken down.

Recycled Bottles

The process begins when a used plastic bottle is placed in your recycling bin instead of the trash. From there, bottles are collected, transported to a recycling facility, and carefully sorted.

Only food-grade PET plastic is chosen for textile production, ensuring both safety and quality. This is where the transformation from waste to woven fabric begins.

Shredded/Flaked

Next, the bottles are thoroughly cleaned and sanitized to remove labels, adhesives, old sticky soda, and any other remaining residue.

Once clean, they’re chopped and shredded into uniformly sized plastic flakes. This prepares the material for its next phase by ensuring consistency in the melting process, to produce only the strongest of fibers.

Melted/Resin

Then, the plastic flakes are melted down and passed through extruders to form long strands. These strands are cooled and chopped into tiny resin pellets.

This step effectively converts plastic waste into a consistent, usable, and stable textile-grade raw material.

Extruded/Spun

When ready, the recycled pellets are spun like cotton candy and pulled into fine fibers, which are then aligned and drawn out to be twisted into yarn.

As with any yarn, the aligned fibers are spun together in a high-speed process to create a continuous thread.

The number of strands, the twist, and the tension applied during this stage are all precisely controlled to achieve the ideal balance of strength, softness, and absorbency...All things we believe are essential traits to have in a dish towel.

Woven Textile

The yarn is then transferred to a mill where it’s woven into our signature waffle weave towels.

The waffle weave maximizes the material’s surface area which further enhances absorbency—creating a durable, lightweight, and surprisingly soft textile designed to do much more than push puddles around.

Our material is engineered to not only dry quickly, and absorb five times its weight in water, but also to stay wrinkle-free, possess antimicrobial properties, and most importantly, actually get the job done.

Printed With Care

The final step is taking the finished fabric and adding our touch.
Each towel is printed using an infusion-based ink process that penetrate deep into the fibers—unlike traditional silk screening where the ink simply sits on top.

This method further preserves the fabric’s full absorbency, ensuring performance isn’t compromised for the sake of looking cute.

We take pride—and take part—in our entire production process, from design to final print. As self-taught print enthusiasts and design nerds, attention to detail is essential. That’s why all of our work is done in small batches and short print runs—
allowing us to minimize waste while maintaining full creative control.

  • Highly Absorbent

    HOLDS 5x ITS WEIGHT IN WATER

    Our signature waffle weave dish towels are engineered for performance—highly absorbent, quick to soak, quick to dry, and built to actually get the job done.

    Holding up to five times their weight in water, we set out to make a dish towel that didn’t just look good—but actually worked too

  • EacH DISHTOWEL IS

    MADE FROM 3.5 REYCLED PLASTIC BOTTLES

    Yep, that’s it—a dish towel made entirely from bottles. What once held soda, juice, or water has found a longer, more purposeful life drying dishes and hands in kitchens everywhere.

    By classification, our dish towels are 100% Recycled Polyester—made from bottles that already served their purpose and were tossed aside.

  • How TO CARE

    MACHINE-WASH COLD, TUMBLE-DRY LOW

    For best care (and the longest lifespan), we recommend following the suggested instructions—but we know life gets busy. If you wash them differently, worry not—they can handle it.

    Do Not Bleach, Do Not Iron,

    Not Suitable for Use as Oven Mitt

Render Purpose-Driven Home Goods

@RENDERGOODS

Render Goods Is a Design and Print Studio Founded in the SF Bay Area, Now Proudly Based in Chicago, IL

All Recycling Process Explanations, Graphics, and Photos were made by, and belong strictly to Render Goods for the education benefit of our customers.

Unauthorized commercial use is not permitted and may result in legal action.

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