Care About This...

FACT: Virgin Polyester and Nylon are both manufactured from gasoline? Crude oil is the natural resource for thousands of everyday items including performance sports clothing worn by cyclists.

FACT: Recycling offsets the need to refine crude oil to produce new materials. On average one pound of recycled fiber conserves the equivalent of half a gallon of gasoline.

FACT: It requries less energy to manufacture recycled plastic than it does to refine crude oil.

The Truth on Recycling:

Two million plastic bottles are used in the U.S. every ten minutes.

51 billion plastic bottles go into landfills every year. 

51 billion plastic bottles placed end-to-end they would wrap around the earth 5 times.

It takes 700 years before a plastic bottle in any landfill starts to decompose.

Less than 30% of plastic bottles in the U.S. are recycled.

Only 11 U.S. states have bottle deposits.

Why Buy Dirt Republic Products:

We believe that we have the ability to keep thousands of plastic bottles out of landfills each year and to save preciouse natural resources by using materials manufactured from consumer waste instead of virgin materials in our clothing. By recycling consumer waste into Dirt Republic Shirts we can influence lower harmful air emissions and help reduce the harmful effects of acid rain and global warming.

Fabrics made from recycled fiber are functionally identical to those made from non-recycled fiber yet they are made without depleting the earth’s natural resources. It takes the equivalent of 20 plastic bottles to make 1 Dirt Republic shirt. There are 10.2M mountain bikers in the US. If we reached just 1% of the biling population we could save over 2M bottles from landfills.

We look to pass on the full benefits of recycling by manufacturing our clothes locally in North Carolina and not overseas. We are very proud that we can pass on the full benefits of recycling plastic and not waste them by shipping raw material from overseas or across the county.

The Technology:

So how do we turn waste plastic in performance materials...

Plastic bottles are picked up at curbside and community recycling centers, and then sorted by type and color. They are stripped of their labels and caps, washed, and crushed, then chopped into flake. These tiny pieces are melted and extruded to create fiber. The fiber produced is crimped, cut, drawn and stretched into desired length for strength, then baled. The baled fiber is then processed into fabric and turned into Dirt Republic performance bike wear.

We love technology when it produces this kind of benefit.