“Environmental Impact Assessment of Microplastic Emissions from textile products with MarILCA modelling in the case of OVS”

Microplastics are ubiquitous in environments and a lot of scientific analyses are being performed to examine their environmental impacts on ecosystems. However, current Life Cycle Assessment LCA modelling is not considering the release and impacts of Microplastics. This gap is due to the missing information on the inventory about Microplastic emissions and missing Characterisation Factors needed to quantify the effects of Microplastics. The goal of this study is to evaluate the Microplastic emissions into marine environments associated to textile products, from a LCA perspective and to apply the Characterisation Factors developed by the group Marine Impact Life Cycle Assessment MarILCA. In particular, microfibres from synthetic textile are a significant component of Microplastics that are found in the oceans. Microfibre pollution in the environment is set to grow due to the growth of fashion industry combined with the popularity of fast fashion. So, this research focuses on a case study of synthetic garments sold by the fast fashion brand OVS S.p.A. It allows to assess the relative importance of Microplastic impacts and to identify the potential range of Microplastic contribution to the overall ecotoxicity. The results highlight that the use phase represents the main source of microfibre, followed by end of life stage and lastly the manufacturing stage. This study confirms the importance of microplastic to ecosystem quality damage with different impact scores depending on the scenario analysis. Nonetheless, uncertainties play a significant role in the development of the methodology due to limited empirical data on emission factors, removal efficiencies and fate of Microplastics in wastewater treatment and landfill systems. However, this work demonstrates the possibility to apply MarILCA CFs to a real case study and it provides a comprehensive attempt to integrate Microplastic impacts into LCA in the textile sector.