Do you know that polyester is a material that prevalent the clothes that we wear every day? The composition of materials used can be found in little clothing tags but most of us are unaware. The picture below features the wash care label found in one of my sports attire.
Clothing Tag
Microplastic
Companies found a way to recycle plastic bottles and turn them into a plastic fabric called polyester. Take a look at this video to see how plastics are recycled and turned into plastic thread filament.
You might think that this is a good way of putting plastic into good use again. But, polyester is actually harming our aquatic system in ways that we cannot see.
As polyester is made from plastic, it is very durable and is able to accumulate in our environment across various temporal scales. In our previous posts we have also established some of the harmful and bioaccumulative aspects of plastic. Studies found that washing a piece of polyester garment is capable of producing 1900 microfibers i.e. plasticisers (Stanes & Gibson, 2017)! Therefore, human-made materials like polyester is unknowingly becoming a significant source of microplastic waste.
Waste Crisis
“Globally just 12% of the material used for clothing ends up being recycled” — Abigail Beall (2020)
Additionally, due to the mixture in the composition of the materials used in our clothes, it difficult for them to be separated and effectively recycled thus, most of them end up in our landfills. Stanes & Gibson (2017) have also articulated that once they end up in the landfills, it is difficult to track their decomposition due to its chemical makeup.
If we continue to create an unsustainable amount of waste, soon we are going to run out of space for trash. Initially, our Semakau Island Landfill has a lifespan till 2045. However, with about 2,100 tonnes of trash sent to the landfill daily, it is projected that Semakau will be filled 15 years from now.
Lebanon’s Waste Crisis
If we don’t find another replacement for Semakau, we might suffer a waste crisis like Lebanon. It is also interesting to find that you can actually guess someone’s consumption pattern by just examining the type of trash. “The tradition of drinking Arabic coffee continues to play an important role in Lebanese culture” (Lebanon Traveler, 2020). The Lebanese are very fond of their coffee thus, coffee cups are a common sight within trash piles.
Cheers,
Shee Wen & Nicole 
References
Beall, A. (2020), BBC. Fast fashion is leading to a mountain of clothing being thrown away each year and has a huge impact on the environment, so can we turn our unwanted garments into something useful? Retrieved October 23, 2020, from https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200710-why-clothes-are-so-hard-to-recycle
Lebanon Traveler. (2020), Serving Fortunes: Coffee Stories in Lebanon. Retrieved October 23, 2020, from https://www.lebanontraveler.com/en/magazine/the-coffee-storytellers/#:~:text=The%20tradition%20of%20drinking%20Arabic,to%20the%20Lebanese%20restaurant%20experience.
Stanes, E. & Gibson, C. (2017), “Materials that linger: An embodied geography of polyester clothes”, Geoforum, vol. 85, pp. 27-36.