Fab Fabrics: Hemp/Recycled PET Blend

You’ve seen plastic bottles turned into lovely felt. Check out this awesome hemp blend that’s 45% fiber from plastic soda bottles!

[Creative Commons photo by Kevin Wong]
This cool fabric comes in five different colors right now: cantaloupe, mint, blueberry, guava, and banana. Each piece helps keep plastic bottles out of the waste stream! You can snag it by the yard over at Green Depot’s shop.

According to the folks at Green Depot:

The process has the capacity to keep almost 3 billion plastic PET soda bottles out of the world’s landfills each year, saving over 1/2 million barrels of oil and eliminating 400,000 tons of harmful air emissions which contribute to acid rain, global warming and smog. The amount of petroleum saved by using post-consumer bottles instead of virgin materials in the manufacturing process annually is enough to supply power to a city the size of Atlanta for an entire year!

That’s a big impact! I’m really drawn to the buttery banana color. It has a lineny look, but the Green Depot folks say it doesn’t wrinkle like linen does. The 55%/45% Hemp/PET blend goes for $7.50 per yard.

They stock some other cool-looking sustainable fabrics at Green Depot, too! Their hemp terry cloth would be great for making bibs or kitchen towels. They’ve also got a nice selection of organic cotton knits.