According to the study, there were over 20 million tonnes of plastic waste generated by international clothes consumption in 2019 alone. Around 40 % of that spare may have been improperly managed, leading to “plastic leakage,” or environmental pollution.
Clothing made from natural fibers like cotton and other natural fibers was divided between the two resources, according to the NC State experts.
They even looked at cheap waste generated across an clothing company’s ‘ value chain,’ which refers to the entire lifecycle of a product– including, for example, not only the piece of apparel itself, but the plastics used to cover it.
” We analysed data on goods, exports and clothes production in locations all over the world”, Richard Venditti, professor of papers science and engineering at NC State and co-author of the study, said in a statement. Next we compared that to current global information on various stages of the clothes value chain to determine how far plastic reaches the atmosphere at each of those points.
” Casey clothing is a major source of cheap waste that enters the environment,” says one woman. There is also wasted from manufacturing, presentation, and also rubber abrasion during transportation, as well as microplastics that get dragged into the waters when we wash our clothes.
According to the study, chemical clothing was the main supply of plastic waste. In the same year, the global clothing industry produced 89 percent of all the plastic waste in the chemical value chain, accounting for 18 million tonnes of spend. Of that, researchers estimated that around 8.3 million tonnes perhaps had leaked into the atmosphere.
Cotton garments made up 1.9 million tonnes of plastic spare, with the remaining 0.31 million tonnes coming from fabrics other than cotton and synthetic garments. The scientists discovered that cheap waste from fabric and other fabrics almost totally came from the plastic used in packaging as opposed to the end-of-life plastic waste produced by discarded chemical clothing.
Additionally, it was discovered that plastic waste may not always end up in the environment where clothing is sold. Most of the resulting pollution came from clothing that was originally sold in high-income nations like the US and Japan, where these items of clothing could be sold on the secondary market.
” What we’re seeing is that in countries like the United States, we have a’ fast fashion ‘ culture where we buy a lot of clothes and do n’t keep them for very long,” said Venditti”. When we discard those clothes, they either go into landfills or, more often, they end up in thrift stores. Some of the clothing purchased at these stores is sold in the US, but frequently it is shipped to other nations where there are inadequate waste management systems to handle that kind of volume. That is where a lot of plastic ends up leaking into the environment.
The study came to the conclusion that the apparel industry needs to undergo significant adjustments to adopt a more circular approach, where raw materials are recycled and do n’t turn into trash. The study also recommended increasing the use of renewable, non-synthetic textiles.
The article,” The global apparel industry is a significant yet overlooked source of plastic leakage,” was published in Nature Communications and is available online in its entirety.