Every wash sheds something. What comes off a polyester shirt does not rot.

24 June 2026 4 min readApolyth

Awareness of microplastics has climbed sharply. One industry survey puts consumer awareness at 41 per cent, against 17 per cent in 2017, and more than half of the people asked now say they would prefer a garment made from fibres that do not shed plastic. That is a large change in a short time, and it has arrived from an unusual direction: not from environmental campaigning but from people worrying about what is next to their skin and in their water.

Here is the mechanism, plainly. Polyester, nylon and acrylic are plastics spun into thread. Every textile sheds fibre when it is agitated, which is what a washing machine does for forty minutes. Cotton sheds too. The difference is what happens next. A cotton fibre is cellulose and will break down. A polyester fibre is a fragment of plastic a few hundred micrometres long, small enough to pass through wastewater treatment, and it does not break down on any timescale that matters to us.

What the numbers look like

Estimates vary widely depending on garment, machine, load and detergent, which is worth saying rather than quoting one confident figure at you. Published measurements put the first wash of synthetic fabric somewhere between roughly 100,000 and 6,300,000 fibres per kilogram of textile, a range spanning nearly two orders of magnitude depending on construction. Fleece and loosely knitted synthetics shed most. New garments shed more for the first several washes, with release levelling off after roughly the third to fifth cycle.

The honest caveat is that this is a hard thing to measure and the range in the literature is wide. Anyone quoting you a precise number for your specific jumper is guessing.

What changing fibre actually fixes

It fixes the shedding. It does not make a garment automatically virtuous, and we would rather say that than let the implication stand.

Cotton has real costs. It is thirsty, conventional cultivation uses a great deal of pesticide, and a cotton garment made badly and thrown away in a season is worse than a synthetic one worn for a decade. Longevity beats fibre choice in almost every honest accounting. The most sustainable garment is the one already in your wardrobe, and the second most sustainable is the one you will still be wearing in five years.

Fibre choice is the easiest thing to put on a label and the smallest part of the answer. How long you keep it is the large part.

So the case for natural fibre is narrower than the marketing usually implies, and it is this: if you are going to buy something, and you are going to wash it a hundred times, choosing a fibre that does not put plastic into the water each time is a real improvement over one that does. That is the whole claim. It is not a claim that the garment is carbon neutral, or that we have solved anything.

What we do about it

No polyester in any main material. That is the standard, and the reason it is worth stating is that it is checkable: the composition is printed on every product page before you buy. Our washed jogger is one hundred per cent cotton at 360gsm. The fitted tees are ninety-six per cent cotton and four per cent elastane, and the elastane is synthetic, which we say on the page rather than hoping you will not look.

Two practical things reduce shedding regardless of what you own. Wash less often and at lower temperatures, because heat and agitation are what tear fibre loose. And wash full loads, because a full drum means less water per garment and less room for clothes to thrash against each other. Neither costs anything.

If most of your wardrobe is synthetic, a filter bag or an in-machine filter catches a meaningful fraction. We do not sell one and have no interest in selling you one. It is simply the thing that works.

Sources

Everything above that is a claim about the world rather than about us is checkable here. If we have got something wrong, we would like to know.