Everywhere you look from the clothes you’re wearing to the bottle you’re drinking out of to many of the objects you see in your average store, there’s some kind of plastic.

While many kinds of plastics are used in manufacturing goods, polyethylene or polythene also known as PE is the most commonly used plastic with annual production of about 80 million tons. When it comes to thermoplastic polymers, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is the most commonly used in the world. Chances are you know it by a different name: polyester.

You’ll find polyester in everything from clothes to plastic bottles to packaging. With its strength, resistance to water and the fact that it’s shatterproof, polyester is widely used in many areas of manufacturing. For a raw plastic distributor, polyester is easy to find, so it’s easily available and easy to distribute.

Polyester was originally used by chemists in the 1940s and has grown into one of the world’s most highly sustainable materials, which also has a positive environmental profile. Since it is so widely used, the global demand for it is more than 50 million metric tons, which means many a raw plastic distributor and industrial plastic distributors can make a profit supplying manufacturers who need it.

It’s important to remember that PET or polyester is known for:

• Impressive strength despite being a lightweight material
• The fact that it’s shatterproof
• Its resistance to water and food (a big reason why it’s ideal in food packaging)
• The fact that it is naturally transparent

So why is it so beloved by manufacturers and raw plastic distributors? Aside from being readily available, its collective properties make it perfect when it comes to making things. Adding polyester to fabrics for clothing adds strength and helps make clothing more resistant to tearing and wrinkling. Since it doesn’t react to water or food, it’s widely used in food packaging.

It’s important to note that PET is available in many different forms if you’re dealing with a raw plastic distributor or plastic distribution services and may have different names depending on how it’s used. Polyester is used for naming when referring to PET in textiles. When it’s used for food and beverage packaging, it’s commonly known as PET resin.

A raw plastic distributor and plastic resin distributors can also supply PET for a number of other uses including CNC machining, 3-D printing and injection molding. Its flexibility and strength allow it to be easily malleable for whatever a manufacturer might need to use it for.

Whatever your manufacturing needs are, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) offers plenty of advantages with natural strength and lightness, natural transparency, resistance to water and being shatterproof. For those reasons and many others, it can be described as the perfect manufacturing material.