At waste recycling stations, empty beverage bottles may be the most popular "scrap". What happened to these beverage bottles after being recycled?

The body of most beverage bottles is made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which has a lot of space for recycling. The collected empty bottles are first crushed and packed, which makes transportation much easier. Next, the squashed beverage bottle passes through a crusher and turns into small pieces of plastic. After a series of cleaning and screening processes, the remaining PET plastic fragments will be heated and melted into small plastic pellets. They can be used as raw materials to produce new plastic products. Sometimes, people will first depolymerize the recycled PET plastic into monomer molecules, and then re-polymerize. The recycled PET plastic can be made into new packaging containers, plastic films, or made into man-made fibers and made into clothes. It may sound strange that the recycled plastic bottle turns into a piece of clothing, but in fact, the same material is indeed widely used in the textile industry. But when it is made into fibers, PET is generally called "polyester fiber" or "polyester".