Fig. 1: Submicrometre particles released during the washing of 12 polyester textiles.
The number of submicrometre particles released during the washing is not influenced by either the cutting method or the textile structure. a, Number of submicrometre particles (100–600 nm, few particles >600 nm were detected by NTA) released per gram of textile for different polyester fabrics cut by scissors or laser. The data are presented as the mean ± sd (n = 3 textile replicates). b, Box plots showing the hydrodynamic size distributions of the submicrometre particles measured by NTA. The black squares represent the mean, the black centre lines denote the median value (50th percentile), and the tops and bottoms of the boxes show the 75th (Q3) and 25th (Q1) percentiles of the dataset. The top and bottom whiskers denote Q3 + 1.5IQR and Q1 − 1.5IQR, respectively, where IQR is the interquartile range Q3 − Q1. The size box plot is converted from size distributions to relative counts at different sizes.
