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The Champions of Sustainability celebration hosted by UNIFI® Inc., Greensboro, N.C., was expanded in 2025 to include speakers on sustainability and tours of two of its facilities in addition to honoring milestones of its brand partners, based on the number of equivalent PET bottles that a brand has used of REPREVE® recycled yarns.
Tours included UNIFI’s PET bottle processing center in Reidsville, N.C., and recycling center in Yadkinville, N.C. At the latter, the plastic flakes and postindustrial polyester are processed into traceable resin then REPREVE yarn. Attendees were encouraged to bring a polyester item for textile-to-textile recycling in the company’s Textile Takeback™ program.
The keynote speaker for the awards presentation was Noel Kinder, former chief sustainability officer at Nike, who expressed that to reach certain demographics, sustainability has to be cool. He also encouraged businesses to be forward-thinking and “bring solutions to the customer before they know there’s a problem.”
Awards included Billion Bottle Awards to customers who have surpassed a billion bottles recycled and Newcomer Awards to new brands. The company also presented Made in the USA Awards, a REPREVE Takeback Early Adopter award and a Sustainable Packaging award for using REPREVE Our Ocean® resin, which is made from plastic recovered within 50 kilometers (31 miles) of coastlines where there is not a formal waste recycling system.
In his remarks, UNIFI CEO and director Eddie Ingle noted, “The [sustainability] journey we are on matters. … We won’t get there easily. This process is time-consuming and difficult.”
That’s true on multiple levels. In February, the company announced 250 layoffs from its Madison, N.C., yarn facility, with the redistribution of the equipment and many of the jobs to other UNIFI plants in the region and to its plant in El Salvador, which allows for vertical production in each region. The Madison plant, the sale of which closed May 29, focused on yarn texturing, covering, knit cord and twisting. The El Salvador facility focuses on textured yarn production for the Central American market. Customers are fabric makers in that region.
This spring, the company released Integr8™, a traceable, spandex-free stretch yarn, and has also added REPREVE with CiCLO® technology, which allows recycled nylon and polyester to biodegrade naturally.
Since 2007, the company has created recycled fiber for apparel, footwear, home goods and other consumer products from more than 42 billion plastic bottles, with a goal of 50 billion by December. It also has recycled the equivalent of 950 million T-shirts of textile and yarn waste.