The pollution of our world with plastics is one of the great environmental challenges of our time. Managing the problem requires an understanding where the plastic actually comes from. The aim of this presentation is to give an overview of the work performed at Empa in the last years to identify sources of plastics in the environment and to model the flows from their use in our society into the environment. Based on the long experience of Empa St. Gallen in textile research, we focused the experimental research on one important source of microplastics: textiles. And there is much more to discover than just fiber release during washing that everybody is talking about! Following the whole life cycle of textiles, it will be shown that a large variety of fibers and other particles are released during various stages of the life cycle of textiles.

The experimental release data from this one specific process is put into a large perspective by the use of modeling. Material flow modeling is used to quantify the magnitude of all plastic flows in our society and is then coupled to a release model to predict the amounts of macro- and microplastics released to water and soils. By using a spatially-resolved release model as basis, we then added a fate model for macro- and microplastics in waters to predict final concentrations in the environment. The complete chain of models and the learnings we obtained from looking at the “big picture” obtained by modeling is presented.