What Does 'Recycled Polyester' Mean in Clothing? We Read Five Tags and the Rule Behind Them

At first glance the words on the swing tag look like a finished answer. Recycled polyester. Two words, one material, nothing left to ask.

They’re anything but. Across the five garment pages I opened this morning, those two words carried five different amounts of actual recycled fibre, counted in three different units, and once they arrived in a sentence that never touched a number at all.

The word is doing one job. The number underneath it is doing a different one, and the rule that separates them has been sitting on a federal website since 2012.

Nothing here was worn, washed, or sent to a lab. I read product pages and regulatory text on September 14, 2026, and every figure below is copied from a document anyone can open. The requests went out from Korea, which matters in one place I’ll flag later.

What does ‘recycled polyester’ actually have to contain?

The Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides, published as 16 CFR Part 260, set the floor in the United States, and section 260.13 is four paragraphs long. Paragraph (c) is the one that decides how a tag reads: “Marketers can make unqualified claims of recycled content if the entire product or package, excluding minor, incidental components, is made from recycled material. For items that are partially made of recycled material, the marketer should clearly and prominently qualify the claim to avoid deception about the amount or percentage, by weight, of recycled content in the finished product or package.”

Read that twice, because a bare claim means effectively all of it. Anything short of that is supposed to arrive with a number attached, and the number’s by weight, not by feel and not by fibre count.

Paragraph (b) adds a second test, about where the material came from. Content only counts as recycled if it was “recovered or otherwise diverted from the waste stream, either during the manufacturing process (pre-consumer), or after consumer use (post-consumer).” The guides then spend seven worked examples on the ways that goes wrong, and Example 1 is the sharpest of them: a manufacturer who sweeps up its own spills and scraps, reprocesses them lightly, and blends them back into the same product is told the claim “is deceptive since the spills and scraps are normally reused by industry within the original manufacturing process and would not normally have entered the waste stream.” Factory offcuts that were never going anywhere don’t count. Someone else’s bottle does.

So a tag that reads recycled polyester and stops there isn’t the soft version. It’s the strong one. The soft version is the one carrying a percentage.

Why does one tag say 79 percent and another say 25 bottles?

Five garment pages, five ways of counting. I picked items that are in season right now, all of them fleece or knit, and copied the wording exactly as each page prints it.

Page	How the material is named	Number printed	Certification named
Patagonia Better Sweater Fleece Jacket	“100% Recycled Polyester Sweater-Knit Fleece”	100 percent body, 100 percent trim and pocket bags	bluesign approved
Madewell (Re)sourced Fleece Cardigan Jacket	“(Re)sourced 100% recycled polyester fleece”	100 percent, from “100% postconsumer waste”	none on the page
Everlane Cropped Luxe Fleece Hoodie	“organic cotton and recycled polyester brushed fleece”	67 percent organic cotton, 33 percent recycled polyester	none on the page
Girlfriend Collective Compressive High-Rise Legging	“79% recycled water bottles (RPET) and 21% spandex”	79 percent, plus “25 recycled water bottles”	OEKO-TEX Standard 100
Patagonia Spring 2026 polyester fabric, all styles	“recycled polyester fabric, by weight”	94 percent, with virgin polyester at 6 percent	Recycled Claim Standard, Global Recycled Standard

Three units in one table.

Percentage by weight is the unit the Green Guides ask for. Bottle count is a different animal, because a bottle isn’t a weight and nobody standing in a shop knows what 25 of them add up to inside a legging. Girlfriend Collective prints both, which is the version I’d want everywhere, though the percentage still sits inside the Fabric and Care drawer rather than up in the description where the bottles are.

The fifth row is the odd one, and it’s odd on purpose. Patagonia’s 94 percent isn’t a garment number at all. It describes the whole Spring 2026 line, measured across every polyester fabric by weight, and the company puts the remainder in the same paragraph: “Virgin polyester, on the other hand, accounts for only 6% of total polyester fabric (by weight) used in our entire Spring 2026 line.”

A line-level figure tells you about a company, not about the jacket in your cart. The two get quoted interchangeably anyway.

Does the claim cover the whole garment?

Everlane’s hoodie is the cleanest illustration of the gap, and it isn’t hiding anything. The description at the top of the page reads “made with cozy organic cotton and recycled polyester brushed fleece,” with no figure anywhere in that sentence. Open Materials and Care further down and the line reads “Materials: 67% Organic Cotton, 33% Recycled Polyester.” Both statements are true. Only one of them is a measurement, and it’s the one behind a click.

That pattern shows up on the standards side too. Patagonia names the Recycled Claim Standard and the Global Recycled Standard as the certifications it asks suppliers to hold, and says they’re there so that “robust chain of custody practices are in place.” I wanted to read the thresholds in those two standards directly.

I couldn’t. The organisation that owns them disallows our crawler in its robots file, so I didn’t request the pages, and you won’t find a claim here about what those thresholds are.

The same applies to the shops that never rendered. H&M, Uniqlo, REI, Old Navy, The North Face, L.L.Bean and J.Crew handed back navigation shells, 403s or blank product frames on the paths I tried, so none of them are in the table. Five brands is five brands. It isn’t the market, and a name missing from the table isn’t evidence of anything.

One more note on where I was standing while reading. Everlane’s page served me a Korean shell with a won price, Girlfriend Collective served dollars, and the composition fields came back identical either way. Prices route by geography. Fibre percentages, on these pages at least, didn’t. That’s worth knowing before anyone quotes a US price off a page read from somewhere else.

What changes on September 27?

Directive (EU) 2024/825 starts applying in thirteen days, and its Article 4 sets the date in one line: “By 27 March 2026, Member States shall adopt and publish the measures necessary to comply with this Directive. They shall immediately inform the Commission thereof. They shall apply those measures from 27 September 2026.”

It doesn’t govern a tag in Ohio or Manchester. It governs the same brands in a market most of them sell into, which is why the wording on international product pages is worth watching this autumn, and three of its passages bear on the tags above.

The first lists the words that stop working on their own. Recital 9 names “environmentally friendly,” “eco-friendly,” “green,” “climate friendly,” “carbon friendly,” “biodegradable” and “biobased” as generic environmental claims, prohibited where recognised excellent environmental performance can’t be demonstrated. A claim escapes that list when the specification is given “in clear and prominent terms on the same medium,” and the text hands over its own contrast: “climate-friendly packaging” is generic, while “100 % of energy used to produce this packaging comes from renewable sources” isn’t.

The second goes after marketing vocabulary directly. Recital 10 says a trader “should not make a generic claim such as ‘conscious’, ‘sustainable’ or ‘responsible’ based exclusively on recognised excellent environmental performance,” because those words also carry social meaning.

Three of the most common collection names in mid-market fashion are sitting in that one sentence.

The third is the one that matters for a 33 percent hoodie. Recital 11 targets “making an environmental claim about the entire product or the trader’s entire business when it actually concerns only a certain aspect of the product.” That’s the gap between a description and a materials field, written down.

None of this makes any of the five pages wrong. I’m not calling anything deceptive and I haven’t checked a single page against an enforcement standard. Patagonia and Girlfriend Collective print percentages in the open, Madewell says post-consumer and means it as a specific claim, and Everlane’s number exists one click below the sentence that omits it. The label reading you’d do on a wool jumper works the same way here, and it’s about the same twenty seconds of work.

What’s shifting is that one of the two rulebooks is about to define the category of words rather than the arithmetic.

The FTC tells you when a percentage is required. The European text tells you what counts as a claim in the first place, and it’s worth letting that document define itself: “‘generic environmental claim’ means any environmental claim made in written or oral form, including through audiovisual media, that is not included on a sustainability label and where the specification of the claim is not provided in clear and prominent terms on the same medium.”

Specification, clear and prominent, same medium. If the number isn’t beside the word, the word is the claim.

Where the numbers came from

Everything quoted here was read on September 14, 2026. The federal text is the FTC’s Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims, 16 CFR Part 260, from the agency’s own copy of the guides, section 260.13 and its seven examples. The European text is Directive (EU) 2024/825, recitals 9 through 11, Article 2 and Article 4. The garment lines come from Patagonia’s polyester materials page and its Better Sweater Fleece Jacket, Madewell’s (Re)sourced Fleece Cardigan Jacket, Everlane’s Cropped Luxe Fleece Hoodie and Girlfriend Collective’s Compressive High-Rise Legging. Robots files were checked for every domain before a single page was requested, and the one that says no wasn’t asked.