IRBN — Journal
The plastic in your clothes.
Most of what hangs in a wardrobe today is plastic. Not a figure of speech — polyester, nylon, acrylic and elastane are plastics, spun into thread and knitted into the clothes worn against the skin every day. Roughly six in ten garments made worldwide are now synthetic.
I spent fourteen years buying clothes before I made any. It taught me to read the label before anything else — and how much of what's sold, at every price, is plastic dressed up as fabric.
What microplastics have to do with what you wear
Every time a synthetic garment is washed, it sheds. Tiny plastic fibres break off the cloth — a single wash can release hundreds of thousands of them — small enough to pass straight through wastewater treatment and out into rivers, soil and the sea.
From there they don't stop. Researchers have found microplastics in drinking water, in salt, in the food chain — and, more recently, in human blood, lungs and placental tissue. What that means for our health isn't settled yet; the science is still catching up, and honest researchers say so plainly. That uncertainty is exactly why a lot of people aren't waiting for a verdict before changing what they buy.
Do cotton clothes shed microplastics?
The honest answer: all fabric sheds when you wash it, cotton included. The difference is what comes off. Cotton fibres are cellulose — a plant material that breaks down in water and soil over months. Synthetic fibres are plastic, and plastic doesn't break down; it only breaks smaller. So a pure cotton garment sheds cotton, and 100% cotton has no plastic in it to shed at all.
The catch is the word pure. A cotton-blend — cotton with polyester or elastane mixed in for stretch or to cut cost — still sheds plastic from its synthetic half. If you're checking your own wardrobe, the label is the whole story: look for 100% cotton, not "cotton-rich" and not "cotton blend."
Why everything we make is cotton
Everything IRBN makes is 100% cotton. No polyester, no elastane, nothing synthetic in the cloth — 400gsm loopback on the sweatshirt, 250gsm on the tee, made in Portugal. It sheds cotton, and nothing plastic.
I won't dress that up as a wellness product or a green badge — it isn't one, and the science doesn't let anyone honestly promise that yet. It's simpler. Cotton is the cloth I wanted to make: something you feel the weight of in the hand, that softens instead of pilling, built to be kept rather than replaced twice a year. That it isn't plastic is just part of what it is.
None of this asks you to overhaul a wardrobe overnight. But the next time you're deciding what to buy, turn the label over first. It tells you more than the price does.