Accumulating 'microplastic' threat to shores

By Mark Kinver Environment reporter, BBC News

Microscopic plastic debris from washing clothes is accumulating in the marine environment and could be entering the food chain, a study has warned.

Researchers traced the "microplastic" back to synthetic clothes, which released up to 1,900 tiny fibres per garment every time they were washed.

Earlier research showed plastic smaller than 1mm were being eaten by animals and getting into the food chain.

The findings appeared in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

"Research we had done before... showed that when we looked at all the bits of plastic in the environment, about 80% was made up from smaller bits of plastic," said co-author Mark Browne, an ecologist now based at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"This really led us to the idea of what sorts of plastic are there and where did they come from."
Dr Browne, a member of the US-based research network National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, said the tiny plastic was a concern because evidence showed that it was making its way into the food chain.

"Once the plastics had been eaten, it transferred from [the animals'] stomachs to their circulation system and actually accumulated in their cells," he told BBC News.

In order to identify how widespread the presence of microplastic was on shorelines, the team took samples from 18 beaches around the globe, including the UK, India and Singapore.

"We found that there was no sample from around the world that did not contain pieces of microplastic."

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From Deb Spofford: Photos of ITMA High Point Weekend

Some of our students from Philadelphia University's Textile Program got an opportunity to stay in High Point, NC to receive an educational tour of ITMA's (International Textile Market Association) design and manufacturing facilities and also included networking events and a portfolio review. 

Opportunity to be published: PATTERNBASE

Lori Weitzner Presents Project to Textile Design Students

This semester, students in the graduate Textile Design program are being challanged to design innovative wall coverings for the Lori Weitzner Design line.

Yesterday Lori presented the project to the students which will involve working with one of the following briefs -

1. Material Connection:

This category is about using unexpected materials to create a textile. This could mean anything from incorporating thermo-plastics to sourcing and re-purposing a recycled material in the vein of our best-selling wallcovering, Newsworthy, which is made of hand-woven strips of newspaper. The idea is to move beyond the usual gamut of fibers (cotton, linen, viscose, etc) to create a product which functions as well as a "traditional" fabric or wallcovering, but offers something new aesthetically.

2. Inside Out:

This category is about designing a textile from the inside out, engineering a fabric or wallcovering on a molecular or structural level to achieve some kind of functional property (like a fabric that blocks radiation or a wallcovering that absorbs sound). While aesthetics are still important, the actual technology that goes into the textile and the resulting function are paramount in this category.

3. Two-way street:

One of our best-selling wallcoverings is Magnetism, the ingenuous pairing of basic linen with a magnetic receptive backing. The result is a wallcovering that is as elegant as any other Weitzner product, and also functional. Now we ask you to consider the next step: a textile that can interact with or respond to the user, just as the user can interact with and respond to it. The result would be a truly interactive textile, a product.

This is a special project under the University's DEC (Design, Engineering & Commerce) extra curriculum. It is conducted as a collaborative project involving students in Textile Design, Industrial Design, Textile Engineering, Fashion Industry Management, Engineering and Business. Each Textile Design graduate student is assigned as the PI (primary Investigator) and will individually form a design team with collaborators in the other majors.

Next week, students will visit the design studios of Lori Weitzner and her recent partner Mark Pollack before launching into this project.