When you're at the gym working hard, you don't get those gains without gaining a bit of sweaty stench, too. Luckily for the right price, clothing manufacturers offer a remedy. Supposedly stink-free exercise clothes that have silver nanoparticles embedded into the fabric.
It sounds a bit gimmicky, but does it actually work? And if it does, how do we know that these particles don't come out in the wash? Your workout clothes, especially ones made of polyester, can trap both the bacteria that cause Bo and the fatty acids from your skin that they feed on.
Its a stinky little paradise no matter how many detergent pods you chuck in there. Fortunately, humanity has known that silver kills bacteria for thousands of years longer than we've known what a bacterium is. Today, silver is used in everything from burn treatments to food storage and even medical devices.
So yeah, it works! Silver is bad news for bacteria. There are multiple ways that can ruin a bacterium today on a molecular level.
Ultimately, silver stops a bacterial cell from performing very basic chemical processes needed for survival. Recent improvements in technology have allowed the scale of anti-bacterial silver to reach you to the realm of nanotechnology. We're talking about particles so small, that you can fit thousands of them across the thinnest of human hairs.
Not all of the methods used to attach silver to your workout shirts are nanotech in the strictest sense. But there's a thin line between Nano and non-Nano when it comes to silver. That's because silver has an interesting property where non-nano sized particles releasing silver ions can generate nano sized ones.
So even though the word nano is a selling point for these kinds of products, silver is pretty much Nano whether or not you meant for it to be. How tightly the silver is attached to the fabric seems to be more important than the size of the particles, both for killing bacteria and for the staying power of your fancy shirt. That's because you want the silver to stay there so it keeps killing bacteria after you wash it.
Methods vary from chemically bonding the silver directly to the polyester fiber of the garment to integrating the silver coated threads into the fabric. Nanotech is trending and all, but clothing treated with silver can release some of that silver out into the environment when it's washed. Losing the silver particles from your exercise clothes is a double whammy.
Not only will the gear lose its special anti stench abilities, but the particles will also end up in our wastewater. This may be trouble, because we don't know the long-term effects that these silver particles can have on the environment. A few have shown that silver can be harmful to fish - at least in a lab setting and at high enough concentrations they can be harmful to humans, too.
Luckily research shows that even incredibly small amounts of silver are effective against bacteria. The less silver that's put into a garment, the less it will leach out in the environment, when it's washed and eventually thrown into a landfill. So the goal for researchers is to get as much bang for their silver buck as possible, using smaller amounts that stick more tightly to garments.
That will improve the anti-stink performance of your gym shorts, which means that you'll hopefully wash them less. Which means you'll use less water and less silver will leak out in the environment. Thanks for watching folks and thanks to Timothy Peterson for asking.
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