Every self-respecting outdoor enthusiast has at least one fleece jacket.
It's like a law of nature.
They're fluffy, warm, easy-to-clean, quick-to-dry, and often made from recycled plastic soda
bottles.
But before you get all granolier-than-thou about your environmentally-friendly wardrobe,
here's some sobering news: Lint from fleece may be polluting oceans and rivers.
We all know about the scourge of plastic floating around water systems worldwide.
We're talking trillions of plastic pieces, weighing in the millions of tons.
And the problem is not restricted to plastics that you can see.
You might remember the hoopla a few years back when researchers discovered that tiny
polystyrene microbeads added to personal care products to help exfoliate skin were getting
washed down drains.
Scientists found that fish and other water creatures were eating these beads—with seriously
negative health impacts.
We'll get to those in a second, but first, let's look at the new plastic menace.
You guessed it, lint.
Every time you toss your fleece into the washing machine, tiny polyester fibers, typically
less than a millimeter across, shed right off.
Sometimes there's as much as two grams of the stuff in every wash.
Unlike your dryer, your washing machine doesn't trap rogue lint, so the tiny plastic fibers
can end up going down the drain and out into nature.
And unlike natural fibers, such as silk and cotton, synthetic fibers can survive a long
time in the wild.
Although most of this synthetic material is caught by treatment plants before it ends
up in waterways, experts estimate that a lot of lint is still making its way into the aquatic
environment.
How much lint are we talking?
Well, let's assume every American owned only five synthetic garments.
And not just fleece, but also products including nylon and acrylic: Your favorite synthetic
sweaters, your quick-dry running wear, your yoga pants.
Let's also assume every American washes these items just once a month.
Based on these assumptions, the U.S. would send 60 metric tons of lint into natural water
systems every year.
And this could be a crazy underestimation given our love of synthetic fibers and our
tendency to wash our clothes a little more than once a month.
But why are folks so freaked out by tiny bits of plastic they can't even see?
Researchers have shown that eating these microplastics can disrupt natural feeding, breeding, or
survival behaviors in a variety of water creatures such as lugworms and medaka, AKA the Japanese
rice fish.
The plastics can also leach chemicals into sea creatures who ingest them.
These compounds include things like colorants, plasticizers, and other additives manufacturers
put into plastics when they're originally made.
But plastic bits and pieces also attract and adsorb persistent environmental pollutants
such as pesticides and flame retardants as they float around.
All these compounds enter the food chain when marine animals ingest the plastics, and there's
concern that they are bioaccumulating in the food chain.
Which means humans also might be getting an additional hit of persistent pollutants when
we chow down on seafood that has chowed down on plastic.
Although scientists are currently figuring out the precise impact on human health from
micro plastic pollution, there's no doubt we've got plastic on our dinner plates.
When scientists sampled the seafood at Half Moon Bay's market, a fancy foodie wonderland
just down the coast from San Francisco, synthetic fibers—including textile lint--were the
most common man-made material found in the market's fish and seafood.
They found plastic fibers in oysters, anchovies, Chinook, and other local fish.
Oh and there's also microplastic in sea salt, too.
In 2015, researchers measured 550 plastic particles per kilogram of ocean-derived Chinese
sea salt.
Makes you kinda want to reduce your salt intake, right?
While some scientists work to figure out how much of a health problem plastic presents,
others are wondering what can be done to reduce our consumption of these tiny fibers.
The environmental case against exfoliating microbeads was strong enough to spur U.S.
legislators to prohibit their use in wash-off personal care products.
But it's sort of hard to imagine how policy-makers could outlaw plastic lint.
So some groups are looking at ways to trap these tiny fibers before they end up in the
water system, say at water treatment plants or even in your washing machine.
For example, the Rozalia Project, an anti-ocean pollution group, is developing a microfiber
catcher for use in washing machines.
How would you cut down on lint pollution?
Let us know in the comments.
Would you be willing to wash your favorite synthetics less often?
The smell on your fleece might increase, but so would your enviro street cred.
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