Does microfiber pollution need a rebrand—again?
The moniker, used to describe the maelstrom of textile bits that slough off clothing after it’s been buffeted around by a vigorous laundry cycle, was previously lumped with the broader concept of microplastic pollution, mostly because the first Patagonia-backed studies that brought the phenomenon to the fore nearly a decade ago were conducted on polyester fleece jackets.
The term of art made sense at the time: Polyester, derived from fossil fuels, typically virgin, is essentially another form of plastic. The shed strands, too, all measured less than 5 millimeters in length. Like the fallout from exfoliating beauty products, plastic bags and blown-out car tires, they slipped past wastewater treatment filters to inundate rivers, lakes and oceans to be devoured by marine life and hoisted up the food chain, entering human bodies.
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Then there was the discovery that all textiles, whether natural or synthetic, have the propensity to shed. In fact, when scientists from the University of Cape Town in South Africa analyzed 2,000 microfibers scooped up from oceans around the world in 2019, they found that only 8 percent were plastic in nature. The rest comprised plant- or animal-based materials such as cotton, wool, hemp and linen. It turned out that certain coatings, dyes and finishes can make even the most biodegradable material a carrier of persistent toxicity.
But Kelly Sheridan, CEO of The Microfibre Consortium, a U.K.-headquartered multi-stakeholder nonprofit better known by its acronym, TMC, wants to make fiber fragmentation catch on, seven years after it enshrined the then-preferred phrasing in its name. The reason boils down to semantics.
“In the textile industry, if you go to some manufacturers and say, ‘What are you doing about microfiber pollution,’ they’ll say they don’t produce microfibers,” she said at a panel during Textile Exchange’s annual conference in October. “Because to them, they say, ‘We don’t produce microfiber cloths.’ And so this terminology has really caused a lot of confusion and, indeed, maybe we don’t help with that with our name, but that’s what we knew at the time. It’s only afterward that this has become a bit of a problem.”
Just about the only sure bet in the knotty and complicated milieu in which fashion operates is how much remains terra incognita. As a former forensic scientist, Sheridan knows that textiles splinter off all the time, not just when they’re laundered or even during the manufacturing process.
“We are fiber-shedding machines,” she said. “I’ve never been involved in any cases where I have had to look at a washing machine or wastewater, and that means the fibers are in the environment everywhere. They are lost from our clothes really easily and transfer around really easily, too. If we want to solve this problem long term, we need to understand and start with the source of the problem, which is the fabric itself.”
The TMC signatory community, which reads like a who’s who of the industry, has to date examined 1,800 different fabrics using the organization’s standardized test method, creating what is now the largest global database on fiber fragmentation. Never mind the textile’s composition; even the slightest tweak—the method of polymer extrusion, the temperature of the dyebath, the thread density, the type of bonding or lamination—can significantly impact its behavior.
There are a number of factors that TMC has been able to pin down. Woven fabrics generally shed less than knits, warp knits are less flaky than weft knits, and filament yarns have better structural integrity than their staple counterparts, though this drawback can be remedied with longer lengths and stronger twists.
But the lack of uniformity across industry practice, plus the sheer breadth of materials it uses in changing permutations, means that knowledge gaps still abound. Knowing that hydrophilic finishes strip off more fibers than hydrophobic ones is one thing, but understanding “what that actually means” and what measures can be taken to mitigate the unleashing of inadvertent byproducts is quite another, Sheridan said.
“When we ask our signatories to test fabrics, we ask them to provide specification details. It’s in the region of around 50 questions of how that fabric was prepared, and so you can imagine the complexity of that,” she said. “The fabrics in the database are all different. And what we’re starting to learn from that is what are the key variables that maybe influence fiber fragmentation from a broad perspective.”
One of the biggest challenges, Sheridan said, is that while you can take one variable and address it in isolation, most textiles involve a multitude of them.
“This is not a simple issue,” she added. “The number of different fabrics in the world is too big to really get your head around. The more we do, the more we learn how little we know. But our approach to that is, rather than doing this in an academic, traditional way, how can we use more advanced methods, statistical methods, to understand large datasets, to start to pick out and pull together the details that are too big and too complex for an individual to understand.”
Finding leverage
That fiber shedding isn’t a problem one company, no matter how large, can solve alone is something that Gudrun Messias, director of global sustainability direction at Adidas, learned the hard way.
It was in 2017, before a standardized test method had coalesced, that the footwear giant decided to run a few hundred of its fabric constructions through a DIY assessment based on washing. Adidas spent a year conducting its study and “sadly enough, the result was inconclusive,” Messias said. It was a sign, she said, that “we need to have more brains on this.” When TMC launched, it was one of the first brands to sign up. Recently, Adidas and its suppliers were involved in a pilot with ZDHC, an Amsterdam-based multi-stakeholder organization whose name derives from its goal of achieving zero discharge of hazardous chemicals, to demonstrate that total suspended solids in wastewater can be used as a measure of fragmented fiber generation.
As Europe cues up a regulatory regime involving greener product design, Messias has been mulling on what that might mean for fiber fragmentation. Legislation, she said, can help align the industry further, but not just yet. Simply put, it’s too early to regulate around a topic that is “not scientifically 100 percent there.”
“We don’t have all the facts, and we want to avoid optimizing around the wrong indicators,” Messias said. “Imagine if [there was a mandate over an assumption] that finished textiles shed less, and we all started coating and finishing our fabrics more. What impact does that have? So I think there’s still a little bit more work to do first.”
The biggest question at a time of limited resources is how companies can best make use of what they have without “reinventing the wheel,” doubling up or making a mess of things by blundering through in the interest of speed, however their good intentions may be, she added.
Earlier this year, TMC linked arms with Fashion for Good, a sustainable innovation platform based in Amsterdam, On, Bestseller, C&A, Levi Strauss & Co., Kering, Norrøna, Paradise Textiles, Positive Materials, Zara owner Inditex and Under Armour, to embark on what they describe as a “landmark” study to suss out the root cause of fiber fragmentation, enhance current test methods and better inform best practices and policies around the topic. The research is zeroing in on three fabric archetypes—cotton knit, cotton woven and polyester knit—to get some idea of what variables influence their shedding and to what extent, none of which has been intuitive.
“I was convinced for several years that the brushing phase [to raise] pile [in a fabric] was where you have a lot of release of fiber fragments,” said Christian Tubito, director of Kering’s Material Innovation Lab. “But it’s not like that. It’s the main dyeing process, where you think nothing happens, that releases a lot of fiber fragments.”
But waiting for perfect solutions is no solution at all, he said. Kering looked at the three fiber release pathways—air, land and water—before settling on water. This led the conglomerate to start including fiber fragmentation in its wider water strategy, rather than siloing it on its own. In 2021, after homing in on wet processing as a major hot spot, Kering purchased the first 15 of PlanetCare’s commercial microfiber filters, capable of capturing 90 percent of shed strands, to install in several knitwear facilities in Italy.
“We know that we can improve, but we want to start to install them already,” Tubito said. The idea, he said, is “to reduce the leakage of this fiber, but also to gain knowledge on the capacity of these filters” as they relate to different fiber types and compositions, optimizing the system for a bigger rollout across Europe in a few years. It may not be fixing the global problem, he said, but it’s employing whatever leverage it has where it can find it.
“We needed to take action,” Tubito said. “And so we decided to take action in this way. It was finding where we could intervene, and not just in relation to synthetics but also to cellulosic-based and animal-based fiber fragmentation.”
There are plenty of resources available for brands that want to get started on and go deeper into their fiber fragmentation journey, Sheridan said. TMC’s data and research reports, glossary and wastewater guidance are freely available on its website. Access to the ZDHC Academy’s training modules only requires a small fee.
The next step, she said, is to discuss, within one’s organization, where and how fiber fragmentation fits into your sustainability strategy, whether it’s water stewardship, circularity, biodiversity or “wherever it may be.” This might be different for different businesses. It could even be a labor issue in factories where textiles are produced, since microfiber dust can fill the atmosphere that workers breathe.
“It’s also important that the people talk across departments and teams, because this issue doesn’t just sit on its own,” Sheridan said. “It’s important that we recognize that fiber fragments, when they enter the environment, have a negative impact right across the sphere. And if we accept that, that means we should be doing something about it.”
That means tackling both ends of the value chain. A 2021 report that the Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit, and Bain & Co., a management consultancy, billed as the first estimate of microfiber emissions from textile manufacturing and materials processing, found that roughly 0.12 million metric tons of synthetic fibers are generated at this pre-consumer stage, similar in magnitude to the consumer-use one, which is to say, laundering. For every 500 shirts manufactured, they said, one disappears as microfiber pollution.
In Kering’s circularity ambition, unveiled in 2021, the Balenciaga and Gucci owner said that tackling microfibers, which it aims to eliminate in its supply chain by 2030, has to be an “open source and collective” approach.
But if collective action by the industry is critical, so too is the need to “use the correct words” so everyone knows what they’re talking about with zero ambiguity, Tubito said. And not just in an abstract manner, but one with immediate consequences for operational circularity. Water that’s been contaminated by textile particles, for instance, cannot be cycled back for reuse.
“A microfiber is a typology of fabric or fiber,” he said. “You have to talk about fiber fragmentation. It means that this fiber can break down into little, little pieces. So also the word is key, and we have to be all aligned on that.”
