Impact of clothes on plastic waste and marine life
Another big contributor to a lot of landfills is clothing. A lot of clothes are made from nylon which takes a very long time to biodegrade. Because of this, it’s extremely important that different materials are explored in order to create a more sustainable way to create clothes.
Plastic items such as water bottles, plates, cups, glasses, dishes, bowls and containers used in homes, restaurants, schools accounted for 0.4% of all solid waste in 2018 compared to the amount of clothes and shoes which added up to 4.4% of all municipal solid waste. Clothes pollute the world’s oceans every day just like plastics. Additionally, whenever clothes are washed in machines, thousands of microfibers leach into the water supply from sewage to rivers and oceans. These tiny microfibers end up back into our food supply, getting ingested by humans and wildlife. BPA from a plastic bottle is dangerous, but these micro plastics we’re consuming are far worse. Carbon footprint of a single polyester T-shirt is 20.56 kg CO2-eq throughout its lifecycle. Additionally, textiles can take more than 200 years to decompose in landfills. The time is now for governments, universities, brands and organizations to urgently design and mobilize more tools for reversing the damage done to the planet by textile waste.
Sea Threads, the new clothing venture is the first to make clothing from 100% Certified Ocean Plastic, with each performance shirt made from one pound of plastics pulled out of the ocean. The United Nations states, plastic waste pollution is a major environmental problem of global concern that has reached epidemic proportions. 100 million tons of plastic are now in the oceans, 80-90 percent of which comes from land-based sources. Reason being because our linear economies aren’t designed to prioritize recapture and reuse, and most recycling systems aren’t equipped to handle the volume of plastics being used. Plastic kills marine animals by choking them, entangling them so they drown or filling their stomachs, so they starve. Performance wear clothing has traditionally been made using virgin plastic materials. Sea Threads sources their plastics for polyester production directly from the ocean and immediate coastlines where they were already actively and negatively affecting the ecosystem. The ocean plastic is cleaned, broken down, extruded into fibres for yarn, woven with textiles and shipped to the U.S. Then, the fabric is cut, sewn and printed into finished garments. The Ultimate goal is to replace all virgin and post-consumer plastics being used to make clothing with marine plastic.
A new clothing beg has been manufactured with the specific purpose of reducing the impact of plastic waste on the environment. Clothing pegs are made of cheap plastic that only adds to the mounting pollution problem. There are alternatives like metal pegs but Indian designer Rutvik Jadhav gives us another innovative option – Blip! Blip is a clothing peg made from rubber that can be easily recycled and lasts for a longer time! It also can be flat-packed and stored easily reducing the hazard of plastic pegs. Unlike the traditional peg that has plastic and metal components that increase manufacturing costs, Blip is entirely made from rubber. The flexible design and innovative approach to something as mundane as a clothing peg has given us an eco-friendly alternative that could help reduce tonnes of plastic waste.
REFERENCES
https://www.ecowatch.com/clothes-made-from-ocean-plastic-2654502640.html
https://www.newsweek.com/your-clothes-create-more-plastic-waste-plates-straws-opinion-1610666
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