RPET stands for “recycled polyethylene terephthalate” or recycled P.E.T.  This PET is a strong, durable and recyclable material that is used for plastic beverage containers, food jars and more. Creating our beautiful and durable fabrics used for LOVE BAGS from recycled plastic involves several steps.Collecting: bottles and other plastics are collected at recycling centers, crushed together into giant cubes of crushed plastic called “bales,” and shipped to the processing plants.  Once there, the plastic is sorted, removing any non-recyclable parts, sorting by color and cleaned.  The cleaning process removes any labels, glue, residue, and any other contaminants. Once cleaned, this leaves pure PET “flakes.”  These flakes are dried, stretched out, and chopped into small pieces known as PET pellets.  From there, these pellets are extruded, passing through a “spinnerate” that heats and then stretched the pellets into very fine string-like fibers.  Thousands of these fibers are then tied together, creating the start of a polyester yarn.  These yarns are then certified and sent to a fabric weaving mill, where they will weave these yarns into our specific LOVE BAGS fabrics.  The final polyester fabric is indiscernible from regular “virgin” polyester.Our fabric mill is 3rd party certified to comply with all recycling standards and all products are verified authentic through a strict compliance policy at our fabric mill.  The process is authenticated by https://www.petersoncontrolunion.com/en and you can see our Certificate of Authenticity .