In the cleanup following the August 8 Olympic opening ceremony, more than 100,000 plastic drinks bottles were collected from waste bins around the Birds Nest stadium and the Olympic Park. But these bottles will be making a re-appearance; to be sure, some will come back as bottles again, but others will be re-incarnated as T-shirts.

The first stop of the 100,000 plastic bottles was the Xiao Wu Ji waste sorting transfer station. There, advanced technology separated them from other waste.

Then they were off to the Beijing Yingchuang recycling company. There, after being sorted by color the bottles were cleaned and disinfected. The plastic waste and polyester fibers, extracted from the treated bottles, will be used as raw materials to make T-shirts, school bags and hats; as well as bottles, of course.

It takes 6 bottles to produce one environmentally-friendly T-shirt with 85 percent recycled polyester contents, and 100 old bottles can be recycled to make 80 new ones. Many companies, including Adidas and Puma use recycled materials to produce environmentally-friendly clothes.

Recycling plastics helps slow down the exhaustion of nonrenewable petroleum resources.

Recycling bottles fits in with the spirit of the “Green Olympics”. It helps to fulfill Beijing’s promise that 100 percent of the waste generated by the Olympics would be classified, and 50 percent would be recycled.

(China.org.cn by Wu Huanshu, August 15, 2008)