Dix Park will get a new food market to accompany the Gipson Play Plaza

Dorothea Dix Park will soon get its first spot to grab a drink or a bite to eat — a first for the city's ambitious efforts to turn the park into a major destination.
Why it matters: Dix Park — the previous home of the former Dorothea Dix Hospital and offices for the N.C. Department for Heath and Human Services — has been billed as Raleigh's chance to build a grand central park for the fast-growing capital city.
Driving the news: The city and private donors are investing heavily into the idea, and the $69 million Gipson Play Plaza is expected to open this spring — creating a new entrance for the park and potentially attracting tens of thousands of new visitors.
In an effort to boost the Gipson Play Plaza, Dix Park will open a new grab-and-go food market inside of a renovated cottage adjacent to the park.
Ruffin Hall, the Dix Park Conservancy's CEO, said in a statement that adding the market is "yet another milestone in our journey to becoming a landmark urban park unlike any other and a welcoming place for all."
Zoom in: The new market — which will be inside the House of Many Porches — will sell a variety of food and drinks, including sandwiches, wraps, coffee, frozen desserts and beer and wine.
It will also include a retail section for North Carolina-based merchants.
The market will be run by the father-and-son duo John and Mike Cline, of Raleigh Park Ventures.
The two already have experience running a market at a city park, previously working on Market 317 and The Bark Bar at Downtown Cary Park.

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WIRED

41 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.

Business Wire

42 minutes ago

• Business Wire

Cleveland-Cliffs to Announce Second-Quarter 2025 Results and Host Conference Call on July 21

CLEVELAND--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. (NYSE: CLF) will announce its second-quarter 2025 earnings results before the U.S. market open on Monday, July 21, 2025. The Company invites interested parties to listen to a live broadcast of a conference call with securities analysts and institutional investors to discuss the results on the same morning, July 21, 2025, at 8:30 am ET. The call can be accessed at and will also be archived and available for replay at that address. About Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. Cleveland-Cliffs is a leading North America-based steel producer with focus on value-added sheet products, particularly for the automotive industry. The Company is vertically integrated from the mining of iron ore, production of pellets and direct reduced iron, and processing of ferrous scrap through primary steelmaking and downstream finishing, stamping, tooling, and tubing. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland-Cliffs employs approximately 30,000 people across its operations in the United States and Canada. For more information, visit

Axios

an hour ago

• Axios

Pinellas to spend $126M to nourish storm-battered beaches

Pinellas County commissioners on Tuesday pushed forward a $126 million project to shore up the county's critically eroded beaches. Why it matters: Beach nourishment, the process of dredging and piping in sand to widen and elevate a shoreline, is long overdue on Pinellas' storm-battered barrier islands. "That sand is not just there for the tourists. It's not just there for the beauty aspect of it," Commissioner Chris Latvala said. "It's there to protect infrastructure. It's there to protect people in their homes and livelihoods and lives." Driving the news: Commissioners approved 6-0, with Chair Brian Scott absent, New Jersey-based environmental construction firm Weeks Marine to carry out the project, which is slated to begin this year. The majority of the funding will come from tourism development tax revenue. The project area spans Upham Beach, Sunshine Beach on the northern tip of Treasure Island, and a stretch of Sand Key from Clearwater to Redington Beach, excluding Belleair Shore. Catch up quick: The county project bypasses a years-long stalemate with the Army Corps of Engineers, which since the mid-1990s had handled the bulk of the cost and work to nourish Pinellas beaches every five to seven years. Such projects require workers to temporarily access private land owned by Gulf-front property owners through an agreement called an easement. In recent years, the Corps reinterpreted its own rules and began requiring all property owners within a project area to grant public access to some of their land in perpetuity — and they mandated 100% participation. With efforts to sway the Corps so far unsuccessful, and with new urgency prompted by Hurricane Helene's destructive storm surge, county officials decided to move forward with their own project. Instead of the wide-ranging easements required by the Corps, the county asked residents to sign temporary construction easements that don't mandate public access. The latest: The county still lacks dozens of easements, with the vast majority in Indian Rocks Beach, Indian Shores and Redington Shores, public works director Kelli Hammer Levy told commissioners at Tuesday's meeting. Workers will skip or partially nourish those areas, she said. Yes, but: The county is still accepting easements and will continue to "right up to the last moment that we can," Hammer Levy said. What's next: Officials will continue to pressure the Corps for a solution, county administrator Barry Burton told commissioners, noting the county can't afford to nourish the beaches regularly.