Renting clothes can reduce the fashion industry’s enormous environmental impact, but so far, the business models have not worked very well. The best chance of success is for a rental company to provide clothing within a niche market, such as specific sportswear, and to work closely with the suppliers and clothing manufacturers. This is shown by a study led by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, which highlights the measures that can make clothing rental a success.
The fashion industry is one of the most polluting industries and can account for up to ten percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, worldwide. In Sweden, over 90 percent of the clothes’ climate impact is linked to the purchase of newly produced goods. Therefore, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, the University of Borås and the research institute Rise have examined alternative, more sustainable business models for the clothing industry.
Based on mathematical predications and experiments, researchers now explain that higher VPD can dehydrate upper airways and trigger the body’s inflammatory and immune response. In the full report, published March 17 in Communications Earth & Environment, they also say that such dehydration and inflammation can be exacerbated by mouth breathing (rates of which are also increasing) and more exposure to air-conditioned and heated indoor air.
“Air dryness is as critical to air quality as air dirtiness, and managing the hydration of our airways is as essential as managing their cleanliness,” says lead author David Edwards, adjunct professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Our findings suggest that all mucosa exposed to the atmosphere, including ocular mucosa, are at risk in dehydrating atmospheres.”
Edwards and the team first looked at whether transpiration, a water loss process that occurs in plants, occurs in mucus of upper airways exposed to dry air environments. High rates of transpiration have proven to cause damaging compression to cells within the leaves of plants, threatening plant survival. The team also sought to see if such compression occurred in upper airway cells.
Researchers exposed cultures of human cells that line the upper airway, known as human bronchial epithelium, to dry air. After exposure, the cells were evaluated for mucus thickness and inflammatory responses. Cells that experienced periods of dry air (with a high VPD) showed thinner mucus and high concentrations of cytokines, or proteins indicating cell inflammation. These results agree with theoretical predictions that mucus thinning occurs in dry air environments and can produce enough cellular compression to trigger inflammation.
The team also confirmed that inflammatory mucus transpiration occurs during normal, relaxed breathing (also called tidal breathing) in an animal model. Researchers exposed healthy mice and mice with preexisting airway dryness, which is common in chronic respiratory diseases, to a week of intermittent dry air. Mice with this preexisting dehydration exhibited immune cells in their lungs, indicating a high inflammatory response, while all mice exposed only to moist air did not.
Based on a climate model study that the team also conducted, they predict that most of America will be at an elevated risk of airway inflammation by the latter half of the century due to higher temperatures and drier air.
Researchers concluded their work by saying these results have implications for other physiological mechanisms in the body, namely dry eye and the movement of water in mucus linings in the eye.
“This manuscript is a game changer for medicine, as human mucosa dehydration is currently a critical threat to human health, which will only increase as global warming continues,” says study co-author Justin Hanes, Ph.D., the Lewis J. Ort Professor of Ophthalmology at the Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins Medicine. “Without a solution, human mucosa will become drier over the years, leading to increased chronic inflammation and associated afflictions.”
“Understanding how our airways dehydrate on exposure to dry air can help us avoid or reverse the inflammatory impact of dehydration by effective behavioral changes, and preventive or therapeutic interventions,” says Edwards.
Collaborators and authors of this research include Aurélie Edwards, Dan Li and Linying Wang of Boston University; Kian Fan Chung of Imperial College London; Deen Bhatta and Andreas Bilstein of Sensory Cloud Inc.; Indika Endirisinghe and Britt Burton Freeman of Illinois Institute of Technology; and Mark Gutay, Alessandra Livraghi-Butrico and Brian Button of University of North Carolina. The authors report no conflict of interest.
Story Source: Materials provided by Johns Hopkins Medicine.
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