We Are What We Wear

 

by Brian T Lynch, MSW

They say we are what we eat. We can now add that we are also what we wear. One way or another, microplastics are pervading our world, getting into the food chain and in our bodies. As microplastics break down further, they can release toxic chemicals into living tissue. Also, their physical presence and size can impact organ or cell functioning.

Whether it’s from weathering erosion of plastic water bottles careless tossed away by a stream or from wastewater from an industrial plant, microplastics are getting everywhere. And now this revelation, according to an article in the New York Times:

“Today, scientists estimate that [our synthetic clothing and other modern fabrics] produce 35% of the microplastic pollution in the world’s oceans (in the form of synthetic microfibers), which would make textiles the largest known source of marine microplastic pollution. That’s about 2.2 million tons of microfibers entering the ocean every year.

To help put that into perspective, all the car and truck tires worldwide release a huge amount of microplastics into both the atmosphere directly or through storm drains and into our lakes, rivers, and streams. About 1.6 million tons of tire microplastics end up in the world’s oceans each year. That is less than what reaches the oceans from washing machines discharging into sewer systems. Most sewage treatment plants capture as much as 98% of the microplastic particles found in wastewater. The high contribution from textiles to the ocean’s microplastics is just a fraction of what gets pumped into sewer lines, and god only knows how much more is blown into the sky from clothes dryers.

What happens to the microplastics that sewerage plants can capture? 

 They become part of the solid waste sludge. Some of that ends up in a landfill, but a lot of sludge is dried, mixed with mulch, and spread on farmland, releasing microplastics back into the biosphere.

What can we do to limit microplastics from clothing? 

We need to do everything we can to keep all plastic out of the biosphere, either by recycling or burying it in a landfill. There are inexpensive washing machine filters for the discharge water that can capture most of the microplastics from our plastic clothing. You have to replace used filter cartridges periodically and toss them in the trash for deposit in a landfill. Think of this as prefiltering before the final filter stage at the sewage plant. NEVER let the washing machine discharge into a stream or the street.

There are no filter systems to capture microplastic for dryers. So, when buying clothes, fabrics that are tightly woven and smooth release fewer microparticles than fleece or softer feeling fabrics. Of course, the best solution is to buy clothes made with natural fibers, like cotton, wool, etc. That’s something we try to do anyway, but I’m going to be more diligent about that now.

What can we do about car tires? 

The smallest wear-particles are so small they become aerosolized. They stay in the air and go wherever the wind blows. The bulk of the larger microplastics from tires currently settle on the roadways and surrounding land. But there is a newly invented device that sits in the wheel well. These capture devices should eventually get installed on new cars and trucks. Replacing the filters would then become part of routine maintenance. 

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Further Readings for the curious

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/reduce-laundry-microfiber-pollution/

https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/2017-002-En.pdf

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30803634/

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b05416