23 Oct Microplastics in the fashion industry
Approximately 14% of all plastic manufactured in the world is used to make synthetic fibers, mainly for clothing. When these are washed, they shed tiny strands that are much thinner than human hair.
There are many products that, at the end of their life cycle, end up reduced to what is called microplastics. It is plastic waste, derived from oil, of a very small size; so much so that some are only measurable in microns🔬.
Microplastics are today one of the most worrisome environmental problems since, due to their size, they end up in the marine food chain, through river discharges, both urban and industrial🌊🎣🚰. Therefore, they not only affect the balance of the marine environment, but also our own health.
A large part of the microplastics that are silently drowning our oceans today come from containers and other plastic products that slowly dissolve in the sea, or from hygiene and cosmetic products. But a very important amount also comes from🎽 the fashion industry, synthetic fabrics and fibers derived from petroleum, which expel them when they are washed. The dumping of microplastics in the water when washing the clothes we use every day is a studied phenomenon, and it indicates that there is a threshold for washing clothes made with fabrics such as acrylics, polyester or polyamide, starting from which the dumping of microplastic waste grows exponentially.
Microplastics in the fashion industry: Zyosh, the answer
Aware of this problem and committed to solving it effectively, at Augusto Bellini, through our R + D + i department, we have found the answer: the Zyosh system.
Zyosh is a system for measuring the degree of release of toxic microparticles from clothing to the environment according to the washes to which it has been subjected. By means of this system, we have devised a label that indicates the level of contamination of the clothes according to the washes to which it has been subjected. When each piece of clothing reaches its threshold of exponential contamination, the label warns by changing color and warning that it is time to ♻️ recycle the piece. In this way, with the Zyosh label, manufacturers and consumers can help reduce microplastics that, with washing clothes, are dumped into the sea.
The Zyosh label contains all the technical information of each piece of clothing individually, and is not only a solution that responds to the concern of those most committed consumers and manufacturers, but also advances the regulatory regulations that will be applied shortly and medium term and that will be increasingly restrictive in terms of the use of synthetic fibers or, at least, the responsibility of the industry in recycling the waste that its products generate.
It is expected that by 2025 important regulations will have already been deployed in the European Union in this regard, and these will profoundly affect both the production systems and the fibers that can be used or not, as well as their recycling , both by the final finales consumers and by the 🏭industry itself. For all this, the Zyosh tag is the solution.
Zyosh is a label for clothing brands and manufacturers that, incorporated into their pieces, provides environmental information to the end user. If you want to know more about how the Zyosh tag works and its features: https://zyosh.com/