Plastics in Clothing - Our impact on nature

Our philosophy at Wake Up Threads is to become aware of creating a positive impact wherever possible. We strive for supporting small businesses and individuals, as we are ourselves a small family-run business. We also want to spread awareness about how clothing is sourced, and hence have selected wholesalers, who support the communities that actually make the shirts. Last but not least sustainability concerns all of us on a planet that is increasingly being destroyed.

Among other things, we have started to notice an increase in the use of plastic materials in clothing. Cotton shirts are our prefered option, but poly-blended materials are often recommended to us for cost factors. Within the last year, the trend of light-weight acrylic, polyester, or 50% plastic based shirts is dominating the market. Plastic in general became the dominant fiber to use over cotton since 2007.

You might be able to notice this if you look at the labels in your own clothing. Socks and underwear, even though often recommended by dermatologists to consist of cotton for better effects on our health, are now almost exclusively available with a mere 2% of cotton. The fashion trend of yoga pants and athletic wear may have contributed to more polyester clothing that we now accept as normal. And fashion in general has a much faster expiration date now than a decade ago, and many items from dresses to jeans contain cheap plastic materials.

Last but not least, turn to your children's pyjama's (non-flammable bears an additional toxic burden known to the scientific community) and athletic clothes, which are almost exclusively plastic based. Once you pay attention to this, it may actually be surprising or even shocking to you to see how hard it is to avoid plastic in clothing. Most commonly used is polyethylene terephthalate (PET), and you will find polyester, nylon, acrylic etc. on almost every label.

Why should this matter to us? A little bit of plastic makes a shirt less likely to wrinkle, makes jeans more stretchy and has many benefits it seems.

However, this comes with a high cost to the environment. When we WASH these plastic clothes, we are releasing thousands of plastic fibers into the water. According to studies 700,000 fibers could be released in just one wash. This microplastic pollution has huge effects on nature, polluting the ocean, our drinking water and being absorbed by animals and hence making it into the food chain. Microplastics have been found in water over a decade ago and finally becoming a topic in the news cycle. When we think of plastic on the ocean we think of plastic bottles and straws. But the broken down small microparticles of plastic fibers from clothing are core issue that needs to be addressed. Recent studies have found that 83% of global tap water contains microplastics! So even some people don’t really care about the environment, it will affect our own health, as "the average person ingests over 5,800 particles of synthetic debris in a year”!

We want to contribute to this awareness and recommend using natural fibers and paying attention to labels - on a side note, cotton as well comes at a high cost to the environment, through the use of water during production, but at least it is biodegradable and won't release further toxins. The more we look into this it can be actually quite depressing, but there are some choices we can make as buyers.

On our end, we try to select cotton shirts and our etsy specials also feature "upcycled clothing" - selected pieces barely worn or often brandnew from our second-hand providers.

We hope, as you take in this information you will help spread the news, so we can each make a difference by taking these small steps. Just like avoiding single use plastics, washing synthetic clothes less frequently, paying attention to labels while shopping and keeping our clothing longer can make a difference.

Let us know what you think in the comments.

For more information read:

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/19/17800654/clothes-plastic-pollution-polyester-washing-machine

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/23/your-polyester-sweater-is-destroying-the-environment-heres-why