Outfit7 Joins Green Game Jam 2025

LIMASSOL, Cyprus, May 29, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Outfit7 is proud to return to the Green Game Jam in 2025, embracing this year's theme, Nurture Yourself with Nature. Once again, Outfit7 is joining forces with game studios worldwide in the annual challenge whereby studios implement environmentally-themed content into their live games. This year, Outfit7's contribution focuses on its popular mobile game, My Talking Hank: Islands, where players join Talking Hank in a beach clean-up mini-game, promoting environmental awareness. Beyond the game, Outfit7 is also supporting nature-focused community efforts, funding the sprucing up of a coastal campsite – including construction of a playground made with recycled materials – and organizing employee volunteering days to help clean and restore green spaces.
Interactive Beach Clean-Up in My Talking Hank: Islands
In My Talking Hank: Islands, players team up with Hank and his friend the turtle in a fun beach clean-up mini-game. As they walk around the beach, players collect trash and sort it into three separate containers, each for a different type of recyclable waste. This interactive experience encourages players to clean up the environment, teaching them about environmental care and sustainability. By properly sorting recyclable materials, players engage in eco-friendly practices while enjoying the game's adventure.
Real-World Impact: Outfit7's Giving Back Initiative
In line with this year's Green Game Jam theme: Nurture Yourself with Nature, Outfit7 Limited is extending its efforts beyond the screen through its long-running Giving Back initiative. Later this year, the company will help restore a coastal youth center in Slovenia, echoing the beach-cleaning theme in My Talking Hank: Islands by cleaning up the area for families in need and funding a new playground for children. Outfit7 employees will take a day off to volunteer, and to turn the message of nature, play, and care into real-world action.
Download My Talking Hank: Islands and join the beach clean-up. Help Hank, have fun, and support a greener world-one swipe at a time.
ABOUT MY TALKING HANK: ISLANDS: Developed by Outfit7 Limited, My Talking Hank: Islands invites players to embark on an exciting island adventure. Join Talking Hank on a journey of exploration as he discovers an island filled with fun and surprises. Take care of Hank in his Tree House, explore the island's interactive map, and meet adorable animal companions. My Talking Hank: Islands offers endless entertainment for players of all ages. Find more information HERE.
Contact: media@outfit7.com
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Washington Post

28 minutes ago

• Washington Post

No one has made fusion power viable yet. Why is Big Tech investing billions?

DEVENS, Massachusetts — Inside a cavernous factory in a quiet Boston exurb, workers wearing hard hats and safety glasses swarm around giant magnets powerful enough to lift an aircraft carrier. In another building — where some work proceeds in strict secrecy — the magnets are being assembled in a spaceshiplike vessel designed to contain a magnetic field in temperatures that will soar to tens of millions of degrees. The plan is to squeeze atoms together and create energy from fusion, a potentially limitless and cheap source of power that scientists have been chasing for decades. The reactor under construction here at Commonwealth Fusion Systems is one of at least 43 private-industry ventures or partnerships in the United States and allied countries that are racing to commercialize fusion power. It's a prize that has eluded scientists for so long, many still believe it can't be done, at least not anytime soon. But tech companies and investors are pouring billions into these companies, encouraged by breakthroughs they contend have placed a sustained fusion reaction tantalizingly within reach. China also factors into their urgency, with a government-sponsored effort there that is putting the West at risk of losing the global competition. Scientists dreaming of fusion are no longer toiling in the shadows. They are being courted by governors, billionaires and tech behemoths eager to get in on the ground floor of what they see as a transformative, carbon-free fusion economy. 'A lot of people thought we were chasing ghosts,' said Michl Binderbauer, at TAE Technologies, which has partnered with Google to build a fusion reactor in Southern California and is one of Commonwealth's top rivals. Now more than $8 billion in mostly private money has been invested in fusion start-ups, most of it in the past four years. 'This really has the ability to change the world,' said Genevieve Kinney, a partner at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm that late last year led a $900 million round of funding for a young company called Pacific Fusion. 'If it happens, the outcomes are massive. It could replace many of the technologies we use today.' The current and former Energy Department secretaries are boosting its promise. 'Fusion has hit that tipping point where things are going to happen fast,' Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a student of fusion decades ago at MIT who ultimately became an oil and gas CEO, said at a conference in Washington this month. While Trump officials have scaled back support for wind and solar energy, Wright has touted fusion because if harnessed, it would produce power without regard to weather or time of day. Fusion also is supported by one of Wright's predecessors, Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist himself who was once skeptical it could be commercialized. To be sure, nobody is promising a miracle overnight. The industry is grappling with the huge challenge of sustaining a fusion reaction, a massive, costly undertaking that could require materials that have yet to be invented. The most optimistic companies talk about getting power on the grid within the next decade, but they caution that electricity from early plants will be very expensive and limited. Skeptics warn that it could take at least another decade or two. But federal and state officials are already beginning to plan for the day fusion power becomes reality. The views of some fusion skeptics began to shift after government scientists in late 2022 used giant lasers to generate a reaction that produced more energy than went into creating it. That reaction lasted just a fraction of a second. But it proved that fusion was achievable, shifting the quest to an engineering challenge to create a lasting reaction, contain it and channel it into usable power. The forecasts for electricity demand around the world in the coming decades dwarf what experts say energy companies can deliver using current technologies. Much of the demand is driven by the intense energy needs of the artificial intelligence industry, motivating some of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies to embed themselves in the fusion moonshot, engaging their AI machinery in the effort to get fusion power out of the lab and onto the power grid. TAE, for example, is so closely collaborating with Google on its work that the Silicon Valley tech giant has a virtual control room on its campus enabling it to engage with the fusion firm's experiments. 'They have access to all the data,' said Binderbauer, a physicist who founded TAE more than a quarter-century ago. 'It's like a marriage. There are very few secrets left. The upshot is that they are partnering deeper with us.' It's a radically different landscape than when Binderbauer launched the company. Now, Moniz sits on TAE's board, and Google and Chevron are major investors. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is the executive chairman of West Coast fusion firm Helion Energy, which has inked an agreement to supply Microsoft with electricity if it gets a plant up and running. Worries that China will win the fusion race are also giving U.S. firms a boost. China is building what experts believe will be one of the most powerful fusion reactors in the world, bigger than the U.S. government facility in Berkeley, California. As with U.S. efforts, the project is focused on advancing nuclear weapon design, as fusion reactors can be used to simulate the conditions of a nuclear explosion. China is now investing substantially more public funds in fusion than the United States is. The risk is that fusion power could be one more U.S. energy innovation, like solar panels and electric-car batteries, that stalls out here amid a lack of public investment, enabling China to monopolize the industry and its supply chains. 'The winner in the fusion race will be the country that can build these plants at scale and do it around the world,' said Jimmy Goodrich, a nonresident fellow at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. He said China is well positioned, as it is vastly outpacing the United States in building traditional nuclear fission reactors — which power today's legacy nuclear plants using technology that splits atoms, rather than fusing them — with 27 under construction compared with zero in America. 'The speed and scale at which they are moving is remarkable,' Goodrich said. 'They can apply that to fusion, and we are left in the dust.' Germany, Japan and Britain are also racing to build the world's first fusion power plant. In the United States, companies are jockeying with one another, sharing some scientific findings and technologies but also making bold claims that their specific approach is superior and most likely to succeed. TAE claims to have the 'cleanest and safest approach to commercial fusion power.' It is conceptually similar to that of Commonwealth Fusion's magnet configuration, called a tokamak, but is designed to use different fuel and operate at lower temperatures. Commonwealth arguably has a leg up, having brokered a deal with Virginia to locate its first fusion plant near Richmond, with the aim of selling 400 megawatts of power by the early 2030s. It is enough electricity to power a sizable data center. The firm spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its Massachusetts magnet factory, which also helps supply the experiments of other fusion companies. Among them is Type One Energy, which in February signed an agreement with the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation's largest public utility, to build a 350-megawatt fusion power plant called Infinity Two on the grounds of a retired coal-powered generating station. Infinity Two would be powered by what is called a stellarator, which the company says will be able to sustain a fusion reaction without needing to invent new materials to handle the heat and energy intensity involved, because it will operate at lower temperatures. Equipment breakdown is one of the biggest challenges fusion faces, as generating energy for even a few seconds can destroy the machinery creating that energy. 'If you have a promising approach but you still need to invent new materials, the hard reality is you are not going to be putting fusion energy on the grid in 10 years,' said Christofer Mowry, CEO of Type One. Other companies aren't using magnets, instead taking the giant-laser approach used by the U.S. government at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Berkeley, where scientists have eight times since late 2022 generated a fusion reaction that expelled more energy than it consumed, known as 'ignition.' The costs are so high and engineering challenges so extreme that one of the most prominent U.S. fusion experts, Harvard physicist and former White House science adviser John Holdren, said in an interview that 'it is extremely unlikely we will see fusion power on the grid much before 2050.' It took scientists 70 years to reach ignition, Holdren said, and developing the engineering capabilities required to sustain that reaction is just as difficult. 'We are just miles short of the conditions a practical reactor would require,' he said. Victor Gilinksy, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has also warned that companies are vastly downplaying the huge hurdles they have yet to overcome. Michel Claessens, former communications director for ITER, an international effort to advance fusion science, says the industry is misleading the public with its promises that fusion energy is within sight. But scientists engaged in the chase say those views are outdated. 'Investors who spend even a cursory amount of time looking into this are coming away thinking there is a path here,' said Bob Mumgaard, an MIT scientist who co-founded Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Still, fusion energy is now where the auto industry would be if it had unlocked the formula for building an internal combustion engine before metal had been invented, said Greg Piefer, CEO of Shine Technologies, a fusion firm in Wisconsin. That makes it a risky business. Shine is using fusion neutrons to develop products such as imaging machines and medical isotopes, so it can stay solvent while trying to unlock commercial electricity. Piefer is acutely aware that no fusion company is going to profitably sell electricity before it reaches what is known as scientific 'break-even' — the point at which the fusion reaction generates more energy than is needed to ignite it. The only place in the United States that has happened is at the government facility in Berkeley — which is the size of three football fields and uses a laser pulse that for a billionth of a second shoots more energy than the entire U.S. power grid 2,500 times over. 'It is pennies worth of heat for millions of dollars in,' Piefer said. 'There are still a lot of factors to overcome.'

Newsweek

31 minutes ago

• Newsweek

Woman on Vacation Picks Fresh Oranges for Juice—Horror at What's in Glass

Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A video showing a mother and daughter making orange juice from street-side fruit in Portugal has gone viral on TikTok, due to the unexpected discovery of what appeared to be maggots writhing in their freshly squeezed drink. Posted by TikTok user @rubywillow._, the video was filmed last week in Portugal's Algarve region and has garnered more than 9.3 million views since it was shared on June 18. It begins with a caption overlaid on the video saying: "You thought it was a good idea to make fresh orange juice in Portugal … it was not." The footage shows a woman collecting fallen oranges from beneath a tree along a public street, with an empty plastic bag in hand. The video then cuts to scenes of the fruit being juiced, and a close-up of the freshly squeezed liquid reveals small white organisms moving visibly in the glass. Screenshots from a TikTok video of a woman making juice from oranges taken from a tree on a street in Portugal. Screenshots from a TikTok video of a woman making juice from oranges taken from a tree on a street in Portugal. @rubywillow._ on TikTok "We believe it was maggots of some kind in the drink," the poster, who did not share her name, age or location, told Newsweek, adding that "it was my first time making orange juice." While her mother consumed half-a-glass and she herself took a single sip, she said, "neither of us were unwell afterward." Suzanne Hyslop, a qualified nutritionist at the Ocean Recovery Centre in the U.K., told Newsweek that the movement in the juice "could very well be fruit fly or other small insects that had burrowed in." She added that "this can happen when oranges are overripe or damaged or have been left on the tree too long." The incident, while amusing to some, comes amid broader challenges facing citrus production in Portugal and elsewhere in southern Europe. A June 2023 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that citrus production in the European Union is primarily based in Mediterranean countries. Spain and Italy are the top producers, followed by Greece, Portugal, and Cyprus. The report stated: "A reduction in EU citrus production is expected mainly in Spain with an almost 18 percent decrease, the lowest citrus production levels since the last decade." It also noted that reductions are projected in Italy and Portugal, particularly in orange yields. Spain's crop alone accounts for roughly 65 percent of the EU's citrus production. Hyslop said: "Picking fruit straight from a tree sounds wonderfully natural, but there are some important things to keep in mind." She cautioned against picking fruit from trees in public areas, adding: "Even in a country known for its fresh produce, safety requires proper handling, hygiene and also quality control," Hyslop said. The nutritionist added that, without knowing how a tree is maintained or what it has been exposed to, there is "no guarantee it's safe to consume." She highlighted possible contaminants such as vehicle emissions, pesticides, animal droppings and other urban pollutants. Despite the mishap, the video has entertained and alarmed viewers in equal measure. User isntthisweird said: "I have never seen maggots in any type of citrus, that's crazy." User house of james noted: "Oh no. I was expecting you to try it and it being sour, but oh my! Disturbing!!" User natasharoots said: "Hmmm extra protein orange juice." User Jennie from the block wrote: "the amount of people that didn't notice the very visible worms swimming in the juice." Do you have a travel-related video or story to share? Let us know via life@ and your story could be featured on Newsweek.

WIRED

44 minutes ago

• WIRED

Recycled Polyester Saved This American Factory. Environmentalists Hate It

Unifi survived competition from China by helping fashion brands meet sustainability goals. But not everyone agrees that its polyester made from recycled plastic bottles should be produced in the US. A worker in a Unifi manufacturing plant oversees the production of Repreve, a polyester product made from recycled plastic bottles. Courtesy of Unifi A visit to one of Unifi's last remaining US polyester plants, in Yadkinville, North Carolina, can make you feel like an optimist. After driving through a sweet little neighborhood of small homes, you crest the hill and see the Unifi facility on your right: giant silver-gray buildings perched on a tidy, gently rolling lawn that looks like an advertisement for organic milk. A small solar farm sits off to the side, and 18-wheelers branded in grass-green and sky-blue livery pull in and out of the property, dropping off clean PET plastic flake and picking up shipments of polyester fiber. This is the flagship factory where one of the world's most popular so-called sustainable fibers is manufactured: polyester made from recycled plastic bottles. In the last 18 years, more than 42 billion bottles have flowed globally through the owned and partner facilities of Unifi and been turned into a branded polyester fabric Unifi calls Repreve. Unifi pioneered this eco-friendly fabric, but today it is far from the only recycled polyester maker. According to Textile Exchange, an industry group that has been pushing the fashion industry to commit to recycled polyester, the apparel industry used 32 million metric tons of polyester fiber in 2019, and approximately 14 percent of this was recycled. That's the equivalent of almost 16 billion bottles a year. Unifi is unique in one sense, though. Traditionally, polyester manufacturers are hidden in the back of fashion's supply chain. They sell to fabric mills, which sell to garment factories, which sell to brands, which sell to you. But Unifi is special; not only does it have a strong relationship with brands, the brands brag to shoppers about using Repreve in their garments. Follow the green and blue ceiling decor as it swishes through the all-white, modern lobby of Unifi, past the recycling and compost receptacles, and into a large meeting room, and you'll see some of the wares created with Repreve: Ugg fuzzy slippers, Rothy's ballet flats, Nike sneakers, Levi's stretch jeans, a Patagonia fleece, a Quicksilver fuzzy camouflage hoodie, a North Face jacket, and an Asics sports bra. Plastic bottles destined for recycling. Courtesy of Unifi Repreve's promise to brands and shoppers is that turning bottles into fiber reduces greenhouse gas emissions by up to 60 percent when compared to virgin polyester fiber, and water consumption by up to two-thirds. Unifi and its brand partners (like the ones I saw in the showroom, and more) also claim to keep old water bottles from going to landfills, incinerators, or the ocean. It's because of this promise that this Unifi factory survived the Great Offshoring of textile manufacturing, and the onslaught of cheap Chinese polyester. Not everyone agrees recycled polyester is part of a better future. Nike is one of Unifi's biggest customers and has bragged that the sportswear brand alone diverts more than one billion plastic bottles a year from landfills and waterways. In May of 2023, a Missouri consumer filed a greenwashing lawsuit against Nike, alleging in part that the recycled polyester in Nike's shoes and shirts isn't actually sustainable. The lawsuit was dismissed, along with a similar complaint against H&M, but it expressed a bubbling resentment against corporations that use recycled polyester to green up their image without addressing the many other forms of environmental and human damage of plastic fashion. Bottle-to-polyester recycling, once thought to be a key tool in combating our global plastic pollution problem, has been under fire for a few years. 'We've been led to believe that recycled and sustainable are synonymous, when they are anything but,' Maxine Bédat, executive director of the New Standard Institute, a nonprofit pushing for a sustainable fashion industry, told The Guardian in 2021. (When I asked her if she stands by that statement today, she said yes.) I'm here in Yadkinville because I wanted to see this operation for myself and decide: Is recycled polyester actually sustainable? Or, as many now claim, is it greenwashing, a get-out-of-jail-free card for brands who want to look like they're saving the planet while going on with their toxic, fossil-fueled business as usual? Over the past two years, that question has morphed into an even more fraught one: Does this factory provide the kind of good, safe factory jobs that Americans say they yearn for, and that Trump's proposed tariffs purport to bring back to our shores? Saved by Sustainability Unifi CEO Eddie Ingle may look like one of the North Carolina good ol' textile boys—gray hair parted to the side, a neat button down and slacks—but he has a clipped Irish accent, visits the farmers market on Saturdays, and drives a Tesla. He started out as an entry-level mechanical engineer in Ireland, moved to North Carolina in 1987 to join Unifi, and ended up staying for 40 years, with just two years away, before returning in 2020 to take the helm as CEO. His paternal pride in his workforce can seem vintage. 'The Unifi people, they are just good North Carolinians,' he tells me over a lunch of fried chicken and mashed potatoes in an old farmhouse that Unifi owns, and which serves as a sort of bed and breakfast for visiting fashion professionals. 'They're conscientious, they're hard-working. A lot of our managers have been here 25, 30 years.' (A third of the company's workforce has been there that long, in fact.) 'It's clean, it's safe, and there's a lot of room for advancement. We have good wages, we offer nice benefits.' 'Certainly the labor force has changed a lot over the last 40 years since I've been here,' he adds. North and South Carolina together used to be a leading global textile hub. The White Oak mill of Cone Mills was once the largest denim mill in the world, and it operated for over 100 years in Greensboro, less than an hour from Unifi's headquarters. The floor of a Unifi factory, where plastic bottles are processed to create synthetic yarn fiber. Courtesy of Unifi Like many textile plants across the Southeast, Cone's White Oak mill is closed now, one of the many casualties of the great textile offshoring of the late 1990s and early 2000s. There are still a few textile and dye manufacturers around the Carolinas, but the bustling fabric industry in the Greensboro area has given way to pharmaceutical plants, dog food factories, and Amazon warehouses delivering Chinese-made goods. According to a (yes, self-mythologizing but extremely detailed) history book that Unifi gave me, through the late '90s, Unifi was known as a fiercely competitive innovator that went from win to win, absorbing smaller polyester companies and going public. It was the place to work, a relief from the heat of North Carolina's tobacco and cotton farms. A lot of Unifi's growth, according to its history book, came from its salesmen convincing brands to try synthetics for an increasing array of products, from drapes to automotive carpeting and military tents. You could make the argument that Unifi is partly responsible for the plasticization of fabrics. Today, polyester makes up more than half of all fashion textiles produced worldwide. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, China was a huge market for Unifi. Unifi says that it and one of its biggest competitors, Macfield (with which it would later merge) were together shipping a million pounds of polyester a week to China. But, the company says, by 1985 China had greatly expanded its own synthetic manufacturing capacity, and slapped tariffs on American polyester. The tide began to shift to the other shore. The North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994, and when China joined the WTO in 2001, a flood of cheap fabrics crashed into the United States. "Between 1997 and 2009, more than 650 textile plant facilities closed in the United States," notes the Textile Heritage Museum in Burlington, North Carolina. Unifi's history book says of the 115 American polyester manufacturing companies in the 1970s, only 12 remain in business as of 2022, when the book was published. The Chinese government was financially supporting the growth of its textile industry; it became impossible for American polyester producers to compete. 'They were selling below raw material costs,' former president Tom Caudle told the company's biographer. 'For the next five to seven years we couldn't shut plants down fast enough and consolidate fast enough to keep up.' Unifi survived, though it shrank and laid off hundreds of employees, closed several plants, and stopped trying to compete with China's cheap polyester. Instead, it sources PET resin, then melt-extrudes it and does what is called texturing, covering, and twisting to turn it into high-end, functional fabrics that have built-in features like water repellency or fire retardancy. Still, China, Vietnam, and Taiwan have a way of copying our innovations, and then doing them with as much skill, for cheaper. About 70 percent of that polyester is now made in China. It was around 2000 that Unifi discovered the fabric that would save its business. It was trying to recycle some bad runs of polyester that would have normally gone in the trash. Even after mixing in virgin PET flake, the experimental product from Unifi and other mills was at first low quality and manila-folder yellow, only suitable to be dyed and put into a fuzzy fleece, and that is where it went. (Both PolarTec and Patagonia had launched their recycled polyester fleece in 1993, though it's unclear if they launched it together in a partnership.) Repreve yarn. Courtesy of Unifi After years of work to create a process that would purify the waste flake so it could be made into a high-quality, white polyester thread, Unifi debuted Repreve at the Outdoor Retailer show in 2004. After a few years, it took off. Fashion brands did not need much convincing to switch to Unifi's new fabric. It had the sheen of sustainability without the unreliability of cotton (a seasonal crop with human rights issues) or the stigma of wool (which draws the ire of animal rights activists). It also came with a ready-made marketing story, literally—Repreve products are sold with a green hang tag in the shape of a water bottle that will sometimes even say how many used bottles went into that particular product. Ingle says the fashion brands Unifi works with 'don't have to compromise anything' when they choose Repreve for their garments. 'They might have paid a little bit more, but the quality of the product is in many ways better.' While rumors of fake recycled polyester dog the industry overall, Repreve is also infused with a proprietary chemical tracer, so the material can be tested to ensure it was actually made in a Unifi facility of old bottles. Since Repreve was launched, it has grown to make up 30 percent of Unifi's revenue. Sold at a premium price, it's been a bright spot for Unifi even when overall demand for fashion and fashion materials has fallen into a global post-pandemic slump. In February 2024, Unifi told investors it would cut costs and focus on Repreve to shore up its finances. 'I'm fairly convinced we wouldn't be where we are today without it,' Ingle says of Repreve. Usually, the textile business is seen as dirty and outdated. But the Repreve factory in North Carolina buzzes with new machinery and young engineers. 'You can attract people when you're in the sustainability business,' he says. Seen up close, Repreve seems like a win for the environment and a win for American jobs. 'Brands like Adidas, Nike, Patagonia, The North Face, they've got all these big commitments around sustainability. If they didn't have a regional secure supply of recycled yarn, there would be a lot of businesses that would just be moved to Asia,' Ingle says. But once you step outside the factory, the picture gets muddy. A Battle Over Bottles When Coca-Cola first introduced its PET plastic bottle in 1978, Unifi's founder Allen Mebane worried the beverage industry would take up all the supply of PET resin. Instead, 20 years later, the opposite has happened, with polyester plants buying up the supply of used water bottles. Forty to 60 truckloads of plastic waste get dropped off at Unifi's bottle processing plant per week, bought from material recovery facilities as far away as Michigan and Maine. In 2023, the CBC did a high-profile investigative piece into fashion's greenwashing, and focused most of its critique on recycled polyester. 'If you're using plastic bottles, you're actually taking bottles out of a potentially closed-loop recycling system, and then giving them a one-way ticket to a landfill disposal,' George Harding-Rolls, a sustainable fashion advocate, told the CBC. But most bottles aren't being recycled anyway. The collection rates for PET plastic started rising around the time Unifi debuted Repreve, hitting 30 percent in 2012 and hovering around there for a decade. Meanwhile, demand for recycled PET from both the fashion and packaged food industry, who have both committed to sourcing recycled material, has soared. It's expected to outpace supply by 2030. 'You know who's complaining about it? The bottle companies,' Ingle says. 'Because they believe the textile industry is taking their bottles.' 'Is that true?' I ask. 'Well, yeah,' he laughs. 'The market for recycled bottles is very transparent. The price of recycled bottles changes twice or sometimes three times a week. So if you want to buy a bottle and turn that bottle back into a bottle, have at it. Nobody is stopping the bottle industry from doing that.' Well, there is one thing. Unifi's willingness to pay more for old bottles, because it's turning them into a premium product that brands and consumers will pay more for, may be driving the market rate of old water bottles up. But nobody wants to pay more for a soda in a bottle made with recycled plastic. A Unifi manufacturing plant. Courtesy of Unifi When I tour the bottle processing plant, large bales of crushed plastic packaging, each averaging roughly 1,000 pounds, are lined up, ready to be run through the sorting, cleaning, and flaking process. There's a clear difference in quality between the clean and uniform bales from states like Michigan, Maine, Vermont, and New York that mandate deposits of a few cents on bottles to incentivize collection, and the chaotic and dirty bales from states that treat recycling as a purely volunteer activity. North Carolina made it illegal to throw out plastic water bottles in 2009, but despite pleas to supply local industry with material so it can create jobs, a 2021 report put the state's PET recycling rate at a measly 8 percent. Ingle thinks if North Carolina passed a bottle bill that levied a 5- or 10-cent deposit on each bottle, Unifi could get everything it needs from within its borders. 'Unifi is involved at the state level in various efforts to increase the recycling rates of PET post-consumer bottles,' he later wrote by email. So what we seem to have is not a demand problem, but a supply problem born of bad government policy. Kirstie Pecci, executive director of Just Zero, a nonprofit that works across the country on waste issues, sees all bottle recycling—no matter what they are made into—as more insidious. 'You're giving cover to a bad practice, which is putting beverages or food in plastic. We should not be drinking or eating out of plastic in any way, shape, or form.' And what about claims that turning bottles into polyester locks PET into a landfill-bound product? Sure, some polyester clothing is for all intents and purposes a single-use product. (Hello, ugly $7 polyester dress bought off of Instagram.) But not the PETA-approved recycled polyester fill inside my well-loved puffy hiking jacket, the knit uppers of my Nike running shoes, or the recycled polyester yoga leggings that I can't bring myself to get rid of because they still look perfect after seven solid years of use. Polyester, for all its faults, does perform. It's lightweight, durable, impervious to water, and increases the durability of any garment it is in. Is it overused? Yes, of course. Polyester baby onesies are an abomination. But I can't imagine doing serious outdoor activities like camping, jogging, or snowboarding without synthetics of some sort. As I've reported, the fashion industry has been looking for a way to recycle polyester garments into polyester fabric, instead of relying on bottles to make more raw fabric. Unifi has been recycling preconsumer waste polyester fabric into polyester fabric for over a decade, for The North Face. It has a textile take-back program in the US, and last year expanded its textile-to-textile recycling to its plants in China. But this is almost completely repurposed factory waste. The barriers to recycling post-consumer polyester into polyester are almost completely out of Unifi's control. Post-consumer polyester fashion is almost always mixed with other materials and hung with zippers and trims. And according to Meredith Boyd, Unifi's chief product officer, it is often dyed, printed, and finished with substances that would become so toxic if they were run through the high-temperature recycling process that doing so would be an OSHA violation. Last year, H&M announced that it is committing to buy $600 million of recycled polyester over seven years from Syre, a Swedish startup that chemically recycles polyester by breaking it down into monomers and then remanufacturing it. Syre says it will open its first pilot plant by the end of this year, and build more plants with the aim of producing 3 million metric tons of circular polyester in a decade, including a gigascale plant in Vietnam in 2027. When I ask, Ingle says he is excited for the new chemical recycling technologies coming up, because Unifi can buy that recycled raw material and spin it into fiber. 'It took 50 years to build out the virgin infrastructure. It won't take 50 years to build out the chemical recycling infrastructure, but it's going to happen and we're going to be right there,' he says. Too Toxic for America? The plastic flake that is eventually processed into Repreve recycled polyester. Courtesy of Unifi There are legitimate questions about whether the Unifi plant can be considered a clean and green workplace. In the bottle processing plant in Reidsville, North Carolina, drifts of plastic particles, like snow banks, are piled in every nook of the machinery that chops the bottles into flake. When I ask our tour guide, a floor manager, if he worries about breathing it in, he says he doesn't. "We do a good job of cleaning it up," he says, adding that the bags of dust that are vacuumed up are sold off, and the wastewater is filtered. But I'm concerned. A 2023 study of a UK plastics recycling plant found that even after the installation of state-of-the-art filters, around 6 percent of the plastic being processed was released into the wastewater as micro and nanoplastic, while the air around the facility was full of microplastics small enough to be hazardous to human health. Scientists are still puzzling out what microplastics do to our health, but one study found that people with IBS tended to have more microplastics, including PET and polyamide (of which nylon is one type), in their gut. While PET seems to be one of the most benign out of all the plastics, at least two studies have found BPA, a hormone-disrupting chemical, in polyester baby clothing, and a number of brands agreed to a settlement with California lawmakers in 2023 over the presence of BPA in polyester athletic shirts. In addition, water utility managers in Reidsville have alleged that Unifi and other polyester manufacturers could be potentially be sources of 1,4-dioxane, a probable human carcinogen, in the Cape Fear watershed, which provides drinking water for over 1 million people as it flows from central to southeast North Carolina. Technically, that's not illegal (especially since Unifi, along with other industrial sources and several towns, successfully lobbied against a North Carolina rule limiting 1,4-dioxane in wastewater). Because 1,4-dioxane is a byproduct of manufacturing PET resin, the EPA declared in late 2024 that almost any exposure to 1,4-dioxane constitutes an unreasonable risk to the health of polyester workers and surrounding communities. There are (very costly) ways to treat wastewater for 1,4-dioxane, so how ensuing regulations would affect Unifi remains to be seen, especially since the EPA doesn't currently seem keen to do any regulating of toxic chemical exposure. Ingle and Boyd both declined to speak in detail about these issues. In person, they cited the advice of Unifi's counsel (BPA), said Unifi follows all regulations (1,4-dioxane), or pled ignorance (microplastics). Follow-up questions to Boyd went unanswered. Ingle responded to follow-up questions via email by writing, 'We maintain active participation in The Microfibre Consortium, in order to support academic and industry research into the source and impact of fiber fragmentation from textiles into the natural environment.' And 'We are compliant with all local, state, and federal regulations for all of our sites.' To advocates, each micro-scandal is proof that there is no environmentally friendly polyester. 'We can't do this sustainably in a nontoxic way, it's literally impossible,' Pecci says. But I left the Repreve plant wondering if we're letting perfect be the enemy of good American jobs. Polyester will continue to be in demand, and it will either be made here in a compliant factory using recycled sources, or abroad in a sketchy factory using fresh petrochemicals. Pecci says she doesn't want to 'call out that company or those people, because they might be the nicest people in the world doing the best they can with what they have.' She described for me a utopia in which nontoxic and natural clothing is all made here and then composted and recycled here. Sounds gorgeous, and impossible. In February of this year, Unifi announced it was closing its Madison, North Carolina, polyester processing plant. It would ship some of its machinery to its Latin American plants, and offer the Madison employees new job opportunities at the Yadkinsville and Reidsville plants, which remain in service. For now, anyway.