Recycled nylon or recycled polyester is fiber made from material that would otherwise have been thrown away, either scrap from manufacturing or products that have already been used, rather than from newly made raw material. In polewear it usually appears as the main yarn in a nylon or polyester blend with elastane. The word tells you where the fiber came from. It does not, by itself, tell you how the garment grips, stretches or lasts, and it is worth separating those two things before it shapes what you buy.
What does "recycled" have to mean?
In the United States, recycled content claims fall under the Federal Trade Commission's Green Guides. The Guides say it is deceptive to claim recycled content unless the material has been "recovered or otherwise diverted from the waste stream," either during manufacturing, which they call pre-consumer, or after consumer use, which they call post-consumer.
Two details in the Guides are useful for a shopper.
The first is about scrap. The FTC gives the example of a manufacturer that collects spilled raw material and scraps and feeds them back into the same production line, and says a recycled claim there would be deceptive, because those scraps "are normally reused by industry within the original manufacturing process" and would not have entered the waste stream anyway. So pre-consumer recycled content is meant to be material that would really have been waste.
The second is about percentages. Marketers can make an unqualified recycled claim only if the entire product, apart from "minor, incidental components," is recycled. If a product is only partly recycled, the Guides say the claim should be qualified to show the amount or percentage, by weight, of recycled content. For a pole short, which is almost always a blend, that means a recycled claim should come with a number. A short whose main yarn is recycled nylon and whose elastane is not is partly recycled, and "made from recycled materials" with no percentage is the vaguer of the two ways to say so.
How is recycled nylon actually made?
There is more than one route, and one well-documented route is ECONYL, a regenerated nylon that Seafish describes as a product of Aquafil, "an Italian company founded in 1965 to produce synthetic fibres and polymers."
Seafish describes the process on a page about end-of-life fishing gear. It says ECONYL only uses the polymer Nylon-6, and that Aquafil's suppliers collect end-of-life fishing nets and ropes, then "extract the Nylon-6 and then sort and clean it." The nylon is then recycled by depolymerisation, which Seafish describes as using "pressure and heat to break the long polymer (large molecule) chains down into their component parts," called monomers, which are rebuilt into new nylon.
That route matters because it is the basis for the strongest claim made about recycled nylon. A case study from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation says Aquafil's system "enables Nylon 6 waste to be regenerated into new Nylon 6 with no loss of quality." That is the company's claim about its own chemical process, reported in the case study. It is a claim about one process, not about every fiber labeled recycled.
And recycled polyester?
Recycled polyester usually starts as plastic bottles. The clothing brand Dedicated describes two routes. The mechanical one, which it calls "the most common method," sterilizes, dries and crushes PET bottles into small chips that are heated and turned into yarn. The chemical one breaks the plastic down by depolymerisation into monomers, the basic building blocks, and builds new polyester from them, the same idea as the nylon process above.
Dedicated also passes on a criticism worth knowing: "recycled polyester clothing cannot be recycled," in the sense that a bottle turned into a garment has reached the last stop in its life cycle. That is a point about what happens after the garment, not about how it performs while you wear it.
What does recycled not change?
How the fabric grips. Grip on the pole comes from skin, and the fabric's job is to stay out of the way while holding the garment in place. That depends on the knit, the finish and the fit, not on whether the polymer was made from oil or from old nets. Our post on why grip matters covers the mechanism.
What the stretch is made of. A recycled nylon or polyester claim is about that yarn. The elastane in the blend is the fiber doing the stretch and recovery, and unless the brand says otherwise, its care needs do not change because the yarn around it is recycled. Heat is still the enemy; see How to wash polewear.
How the garment is built. Seams, lining, leg edges and waistband construction decide most of how a pole short performs. A recycled yarn in a poorly built short is still a poorly built short.
What the label has to say. The fiber content line on a US garment label still uses generic fiber names and percentages, which we covered in What the label has to tell you. Recycled is a marketing claim with its own rules on top of that, not a different fiber name.
What should you look for?
- A percentage. If a brand says recycled, look for how much, by weight. The FTC expects partial claims to be qualified.
- The source, if they say it. Pre-consumer or post-consumer, nets or bottles or factory waste. A brand that knows will usually say.
- The named fiber, if there is one. A branded recycled yarn gives you something to look up. An unnamed one gives you the brand's word.
- Everything else you would check anyway. Opacity, fit and construction, because recycled content does not stand in for any of them.
Quick answers
Is recycled nylon as good as new nylon? Aquafil says its chemically recycled ECONYL nylon has no loss of quality compared with new nylon. That is a claim about one process; other recycled fibers can be made other ways.
How is recycled polyester made? Usually from PET bottles, most commonly by crushing them into chips that are melted into yarn, and sometimes by breaking the plastic down chemically and rebuilding it.
Does recycled polewear grip the pole differently? Not because it is recycled. Grip depends on skin, knit, finish and fit.
What does pre-consumer recycled mean? Material diverted from the waste stream during manufacturing. Under the FTC Green Guides, scrap normally reused in the same production line does not count.
Should a recycled claim include a percentage? For a product that is only partly recycled, the FTC Green Guides say yes, by weight.