Aquafil’s Microplastics Testing Method an ‘Industry First’
To combat microplastic pollution, the industry must first know how to measure just how big the problem is.
Aquafil claims an “industry first” for developing a methodology to calculate the exact amount of microplastics released in the textile industry.
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After five years, the Italian textile manufacturer has successfully developed the global measurement system, in partnership with the National Research Council of Italy, Sistemi e Tecnologie Industriali Intelligenti per il Manifatturiero Avanzato (CNR STIIMA Biella) and the UNI technical standards association, a nonprofit organization studying, developing and publishing standards in Italy for more than 100 years.
“The entire textile sector can benefit from this tool since products can be created with greater awareness regarding microplastics’ impact on pollution,” CNR STIIMA Biella said in a statement. “This measurement methodology, the result of the expertise of an all-Italian working group, has as practical implications that all laboratories worldwide will have a standardized protocol that will allow them to size and establish the composition of microplastics.”
The tool, called ISO 4484-2:2023, exists to give the global textile community a standardized method to qualitatively and quantitatively measure the impacts of microplastics (including fibrous plastics) in solid, liquid or gaseous forms.
Aquafil hopes that this international standard will give designers “an opportunity to consciously create their products from an eco-design perspective.”
“The idea from the beginning was to create a tool for eco-designers that makes it clear at the ‘concept stage’ what should be the best way to build a textile product so that it is the least impactful as possible and the most sustainable and circular,” Tiziano Battistini, group innovation research and development coordinator of Aquafil told Sourcing Journal. “There was no official method but a Babylon of methods and none of them spoke to each other, creating great confusion of useless and mutually non-comparable data, let alone usable for [the] creation of a mitigation strategy for the problem. And so, the scope is: “For a future reduction of the microplastics footprint of the textile industry and of its products.’”
ISO 4484-2 will also function as a “powerful legislative tool,” encouraging leaders to ratify regulations and limitations within the textile value chain.
According to Raffaella Mossotti of CNR STIIMA Biella, a standard method that can be used by labs all over the world is in place, allowing researchers to collect data from the entire production textile cycle concerning the characteristics and parameters, which can play a significant role in the release of microplastic fibers. Creating a data bank may lead to adopting best practices and substantial change in current pollution laws in the EU, where, in March 2022, the European Commission presented a strategy for sustainable and circular textiles.
“By identifying, through standard measurement, the release of microplastics from different products and processes, it will be possible to define for each type of these—a baseline, a value beyond which legislators can set and impose targets for improvement,” Battistini said. “This will then be the beginning of hard work toward reducing the impact of microplastics from the textile sector.”
The team was led by Battistini, and composed of researchers of CNR-STIIMA Biella, Anastasia Anceschi, and Giulia Dalla Fontana, coordinated by the scientific head Raffaella Mossotti. The project was supported by the textile technical committee of UNI CT 046 and by Angela Donati, convenor of the ISO working group of the textile technical committee.
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