How yarn and polyester are made
How the goods are actually made, because the route decides the price.
Spinning systems, and what they do to a price
The same count from two different spinning systems is two different products. The system is the second thing on any yarn specification, right after the count.
| System | What it is | Typical use | Price position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ring, carded | The default. Fibres carded, not combed; short fibres stay in. | Weaving and knitting across the count range | The baseline price. |
| Ring, combed | A combing pass removes short fibres and neps. | Finer counts, better fabric surface, shirting, fine knits | Above carded, because combing wastes 12 to 18 percent of the fibre. |
| Ring, compact | A condensing zone tightens the yarn body; less hairiness, higher strength. | Premium wovens and knits, high speed downstream processing | A further premium over combed. |
| Rotor (open end) | Fibres spun from a rotor, not a ring. Fast and cheap, weaker and harsher hand. | Coarse counts: denim, towels, workwear, weft yarns | The cheapest cotton yarn per kilogram. |
| Air jet / vortex | Fibres wrapped by an air stream at very high speed. Low hairiness, lean yarn. | Mostly viscose, polyester and blends for knits | Between rotor and ring for the counts it serves. |
The polyester chain, from crude oil to a knitting machine
Polyester is more than half the fibre the world wears, and its price is not set in a cotton market at all. It is set in an oil refinery and a Chinese chemical plant. These are the links, in the order the molecules travel, and the short codes are the same ones on the polyester module of the market page.
| Code | Full name | What it is, and why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| PX | Paraxylene | Refined from crude oil naphtha. The first link between the oil price and your polyester price. |
| MEG | Mono ethylene glycol | The second input. Made from ethylene, also out of the oil and gas stream. |
| PTA | Purified terephthalic acid | Made from PX. PTA plus MEG, polymerised, is polyester. Roughly 0.86 kg of PTA and 0.34 kg of MEG make a kilogram of polyester. |
| PET chip | Polyethylene terephthalate resin | Solid polyester. Bottle grade chip is where mechanically recycled polyester comes from, which is why a recycled yarn price tracks the bottle market and not the fibre market. |
| PSF | Polyester staple fibre | Polyester cut into short lengths so it can be spun on cotton system machinery. This is the fibre in every polyester cotton blend. |
| POY | Partially oriented yarn | Continuous filament, only partly drawn. Almost never sold to a garment maker: it is the feedstock for texturing. |
| DTY | Draw textured yarn | POY drawn and crimped in one operation. Bulked, stretchy, matte. The filament yarn most knitters actually buy. |
| FDY | Fully drawn yarn | Drawn flat with no texturing. Smooth and lustrous, for wovens, linings and sewing thread. |
| VSF | Viscose staple fibre | Not polyester at all. Made from wood pulp, so it moves with pulp and caustic soda rather than with oil, and is the usual third fibre in a blend. |
Three practical consequences fall out of that table. First, crude oil is upstream of every polyester price, which is why a crude figure sits on a textile page at all, though the link is loose and lagged rather than mechanical: refining margins, plant outages and Chinese demand all sit in between.
Second, China is where this chain is priced. The Zhengzhou exchange lists futures on PTA, paraxylene, staple fibre and bottle chip, and those settlements are the forward view Asian sellers quote against, whatever their own local cost. That is why the market page carries them.
Third, recycled polyester does not come from the fibre market. Mechanically recycled polyester is made from used bottles, so its cost follows bottle grade chip and the collection system, and it can be dearer than virgin fibre even though it started as waste. A recycled quote that tracks the virgin price exactly is worth a question.