Waste fabric is shredded and densified or re-extruded into pellets, then blended back into virgin polymer at a set ratio. Repro cuts raw material cost, but it carries degraded polymer, additives and contamination, so too high a ratio brings drips, filament breaks and color shifts. Each line sets a maximum repro percentage per product.
Repro is at 8 percent on the spunbond beams, and medical grades stay virgin only.
Meltblown beams run on virgin resin, because any contamination there shows up straight away as shot and pinholes.
Also heard as
- regrind
- reclaim
- recycled polymer
Related terms
Edge trim
Strips cut from both sides of a nonwoven web to give clean edges and the correct finished width.
Chips
Shop word for the polymer pellets fed to spunbond, meltblown and fiber extrusion lines.
Drip
Lump of polymer that falls from a spinneret or die and lands in the web as a hard, often glassy spot.
Seconds
Off-quality nonwoven sold at a discount instead of as prime, such as start-up material or off-spec rolls.