To combat microplastic pollution in the fashion industry, a research team at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland has created a grading system under the direction of Lisa Macintyre, associate professor of textiles at Heriot-Watt’s School of Textiles.
More specifically, according to a university press release, the researchers have created “the world’s first visual fibre fragmentation scale.”
Four years of research led to the new grading scheme. It uses a five-point scale to measure the amount of fibre particles lost from various garment materials. For example, the laundry process and normal wear and tear can cause thousands of small threads to be shed from some types of clothes.
The volume of pieces from each type of garment material was scored by the research team from 1 to 5, where grade 5 denoted the least amount of shed fibres and grade 1 the greatest.
When processing a big amount of goods, the new technology is quicker and more economical than other methods, such the one employed by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), according to the Heriot-Watt researchers.
According to the release, “manufacturers can swiftly identify low shedding materials and choose these for additional testing to determine their suitability for garment production, which holds significant advantages.”
Head researcher Lisa Macintyre commented on the news in a release, saying: “The microplastics problem is massive.” Because pieces of plastic fibres, such as polyester and nylon, are shed from garments, fashion and textiles are one of the main sources of secondary microplastics in the environment. Visual scales, such as the grey scale, which evaluates colour fading or staining, are already used in the fashion industry to gauge how much bobbling a material may experience on its surface. However, there was no similar instrument for fibre shedding.
The five-point scale, which is unexpectedly more accurate at evaluating very low levels of fragmentation than the comparable method of weighing fibres, can be used to grade the filters used to collect fibre fragments from laundry effluent.