Saturday 19 March 2016

Fabrics and how they rot, or not.


I am working on a series of posters about plastic pollution of our beaches, seas and oceans.
I used to like finding fabric items on the beach and if they were attractive enough using them in textile illustrations. They were chance discoveries of someone else's history, a little like archeology and I liked to weave them back into the 'fabric of life' by making them key parts of my work.

However lately, I have been finding a lot of plastic gloves, garments and shoes that are man made and do not biodegrade. As I find greater quantities of them, I am realising the incredible damage that these cheap engineered synthetic fabrics are having on our environment and thus on our water and food.
This is bad enough, but then I find that research is being conducted on the vast amounts of microscopic filaments that these garments release just through being washed which are then ingested along our coasts by sea creatures. These tiny fibers cannot be gathered in a beach clean these are infecting our world at a microscopic level that is impossible to fix.

Solution, don't buy man-made fibers buy organic cotton, linen, flax and wool.
Stop the rot by buying fabrics that do rot.

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