Microplastics Shedding from Textiles—Developing Analytical Method for Measurement of Shed Material Representing Release during Domestic Washing

The topic of shedding of micro-sized polymeric particles, so called microplastics, from textiles has been covered by an increasing number of studies over the past years. However, the methods with which the shedding of microplastics from textiles has been measured so far has shown a large variation. Consequently, the results regarding the amount of shed particles also vary, from 120 to 728,289 particles from similar garments in recent studies. This article presents research enabling for identification of whether the shedding of microplastics from different types of fabric was dependent on construction parameters. As none of the methods in the existing literature could be used for evaluating shedding of microplastics from textiles, a method was developed for this purpose. The resulting final method is described in this paper as well as the work with minimizing the error sources and consequently the standard deviation of the results through selection of material samples, equipment and procedure for sample preparation, washing, filtering the washing water and analyzing the shed microplastics. Comparing the environmental load of different garments, or identifying improvement possibilities in garment construction are two examples of how the method can be utilized.