Investigation of ring, airjet and rotor spun yarn structures on the fragmented fibers (microplastics) released from polyester textiles during laundering

Abstract

The release of fragmented fibers (FFs), including microplastics from textiles, during their service life is considered an established source of environmental pollution. The yarn structure is identified to affect the amount and length distribution profile of shed FFs from textiles. In the present work, the impact of yarn structures spun from 100% polyester staple fibers, using commercially relevant spun yarn technologies in the textile industry, on the release of FFs from textiles is studied. The bespoke woven fabric samples produced from three types of spun yarns, which include ring, airjet (air vortex) and rotor yarns, were subjected to an accelerated washing process, for up to five washes, to quantify shed FFs and their length distribution profile. The morphological shapes of FF ends associated with the nature of fiber damage were also investigated. The results demonstrated that airjet and rotor yarn structures had released 28% and 33% less mass of FFs, respectively, as compared to the ring yarn structure during the whole washing process. The length distribution profile identified that the ring yarn structure shed longer length FFs as compared to both airjet and rotor ones. The damaged ends highlight the importance of textile manufacturing processes on the generation of FFs. The results of this study give a better understanding of the yarn structural effect of commercially relevant technologies on shedding of FFs, which are released as a pollutant to the environment.

Investigating the influence of yarn characteristics on microfibre release from knitted fabrics during laundering

“…The mass of microfibre released from vortex-spun yarns was significantly lower than the corresponding ring-spun yarns in all cases as determined by a two-tailed t-test. These results are in agreement with other studies which have reported lower microfibre release from air-jet/vortex spun yarns when compared with conventional ring spinning (Pinlova et al, 2022;Jabbar and Tausif, 2023).…”

“…For example, four times as much microfibre release was observed when production speeds were increased by 25%, whereas yarns produced by other spinning systems were not as affected by changing production speeds (Pinlova et al, 2022). By contrast, a recent study found both air-jet and rotor-spun yarns released significantly fewer microfibres than ring-spun yarns (Jabbar and Tausif, 2023). The researchers noted that their results for rotor-spun yarns may have differed from previous studies as their testing was conducted on woven fabrics rather than on yarns directly.…”

“…agitation encountered in regular use leads to their formation. However, many of these microfibres may already be present in the fabric before it reaches consumers, as is demonstrated by numerous reports of decreasing quantity of microfibres released in laundering with repeated laundering cycles (Pirc et al, 2016;Sillanpää and Sainio, 2017;Carney Almroth et al, 2018;Belzagui et al, 2019;Kelly et al, 2019;Zambrano et al, 2019;Cai et al, 2020b;Cesa et al, 2020;Lant et al, 2020;Vassilenko et al, 2021;Özkan and Gündoğdu, 2021;Rathinamoorthy and Raja Balasaraswathi, 2022b;Jabbar and Tausif, 2023). This suggests that many microfibres are being formed during the fabric manufacturing and remain loosely held within the fabric structure.…”

“…Cai et al confirmed the presence of microfibres within textiles throughout the manufacturing process, and they also noted that the majority of microfibres were released during the first extraction, and a sharp decrease in the quantity of microfibres released in subsequent extractions (Cai et al, 2020a). Additionally, Jabbar and Tausif investigated the fibre-end morphologies of microfibres released from washing woven fabrics and they found that most fibre damage appeared to have been caused by high-energy loading conditions, indicating that the damage was likely initiated during manufacturing rather than during laundering (Jabbar and Tausif, 2023).…”

Microfiber Fragment Pollution: Sources, Toxicity, Strategies, and Technologies for Remediation

“…Contrastingly, Hazlehurst et al [56] found that increasing wash temperature from 40 • C to 90 • C decreased MF shedding. With subsequent washings, many studies found a decreasing trend of MFs released after the first wash, and a plateau was reached around the fifth wash [39,66]. Additionally, fiber identification and quantification methods vary significantly among studies [43].…”