Local flavour to recycled material in Sri Lanka cricket shirts
21/11/2019
Major textile group MAS Holdings is a Sri Lankan company. It launched its ocean plastics initiative as long ago as 2015 when it began a discussion about recovered plastic with the Sri Lankan navy. By then, the navy had already established its own marine conservation and monitoring unit, which was collecting 800 kilos of waste from sea and shore each week.
From the following year, an enhanced project began with the backing of MAS Holdings to make waste recovery and segregation more effective. The textile company donated three plastic crusher machines to the navy.
After several years of perfecting its techniques for working with the recovered material, MAS Holdings decided to incorporate into the special shirts the Sri Lanka cricket team wore at the 2019 World Cup. It developed what it has called “a breakthrough fabric” with a high level of moisture management functionality.
The shirts even incorporated a representation of sea turtles into the design. Sea turtles are an important part of Sri Lanka’s coastal ecosystem, with its 1,340 kilometres of shore providing good nesting grounds for five of the world’s seven existing species.
Jellyfish and seaweed make up a large share of the diet of these marine creatures and MAS said it came as no surprise to find that sea turtles were falling victim to marine pollution. It decided to incorporate a design element representing sea turtles into the cricket shirts to represent these creatures’ vulnerability.
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