Discover
Microfiber Pollution
Published November 30, 2021
Mountains invade our oceans.
Some float, some plummet, some repose in the bellies of blue whales.
One mountain thrives amid the Great Pacific. It stretches as far as 1.6 million square kilometers. It grows by the hour; the rivers are carriers to its swelling supply.
Taking off from California to Hawaii on a cloudless, sun-filled afternoon, you might just see it. If you look close enough, you wouldn’t find its wide basins, its rugged precipice, or its gaping caves. Nor would you find its languishing boulders, limestone, or gravel.
Bags, straws, cotton buds, wrappers: they swirl in clumps within a colossal gyre. Came from storm runoffs, sewer overflows, river floods, people.
Looking closer into this vortex of trash, its monotony bores your mind. This one plastic bottle finishes its third orbit this year. Even when staring through the transparency of this bottle alone, you can see the sprawling of its ridges, the weathered terrain of what used to be a flawless pattern. And the stone—endless particles casting off into the sea.
As this bottle wastes away—like others in this wasteful void—it sheds plastic too small for the eye to see. Across multiple oceans suspends a scattering four-billion plastic particles per square kilometer.
They are voiceless. They are hidden. They are deathly.
Synthetic Microfibers
Synthetic fibers comprise about 60% of our clothing materials worldwide. All throughout this clothing’s lifespan, tiny plastic particles called synthetic microfibers shed from its exterior lining.
Synthetic microfibers generally tear from clothes when the fabric stretches or rubs against another material. When clothing ages, its fiber loses strength, making it effortless for microfibers to shed, as though simply brushing off the fabric.
The microfibers that shed from our clothes can be either natural or synthetic. Natural microfibers can biodegrade into nature’s most basic compounds—CO2, H2O, O2—within weeks. Synthetic microfibers, though, can take decades to biodegrade.
The following list presents the most common polymers that shed synthetic microfibers:
Nylon—a soft thermoplastic made from petroleum. Resistant to abrasion; has high tensile and comprehensive strength, and is known to be frictionless.
Polyester—used to blend with cotton to produce a material that’s flexible and tear-resistant.
Acrylic—similar to wool fiber. Lightweight, warm, and soft. The fabric is typically blended with sheep wool or cashmere.
Washing synthetic fibers in a washing machine renders a more disastrous situation. The constant spinning from the wash, the smacking of the water, the cruelty from the detergent; these contribute to the release of microfibers. For every use of the washing machine, approximately 700,000 microfibers are torn from our clothes.
All these microfibers, both natural and synthetic, flow from the wash to our sewers, bypass municipal filtering systems, ride along the current into rivers, and finally live out their lifespans among the vast oceans.
Note
Municipal filtering systems can only catch
up to 25% of total microplastics that
flow from local sewers.
Synthetic microfibers do so well with passing through the best filtration systems because of their arbitrary sizes and shapes. Even when the best filtration system is implemented, long nanometric chains of plastic particles are slim enough to nestle through the filter’s membrane.
Microplastics
Microfiber pollution doesn’t just start from our clothes and stop at the sea—traces of plastic particles have been found in tap water, bottled water, and prepackaged food. These plastic particles, known as microplastics, are fragments of larger plastics, and typically range in size from 5 millimeters in diameter to as small as one micron.
Note
The older a plastic item is,
the more microplastic particles it sheds.
Today, the global economy relies on plastic, its presence reaching into every industry to date. For this reason alone, microplastics are everywhere. From facial scrubs to car tires; to cigarette butts and takeaway cups; to glitter, paint, tea bags, tennis balls, shopping bags, brooms, toothbrushes. Your floor tiles, your ruler, your cables, your plumbing pipes, your backyard fence, your bedsheets, your light switch.
Health
Humans cannot digest microplastics. Once these particles coat the interior lining of your intestinal tract, they have great potential to cause gastrointestinal dysmotility and local inflammation. Microplastics less than 1.5 micrometers in diameter can cause direct cellular damage, and can easily penetrate and accumulate in nearby tissues.
Note
It is said that the average person will annually ingest up
to 11,000 microplastic particles when consuming seafood.
Aquatic Life
When microplastics spread across aquatic environments, fish and all other aquatic life mistake them for a food source. On the coastal regions of Indonesia and California, fish sold for human consumption each year are found to carry discernible portions of microplastic—which not only means that fish are consuming them, but also humans.
Microplastics can harm a number of fish, as well as turtles and birds. Similarly with people, aquatic organisms cannot digest any type of synthetic fibers. Once consumed, microplastics can block an organism’s digestive tract, thereby diminishing their urge to eat.
Large bodies of aquatic life are affected so much that their feeding and schooling behaviors are altered altogether. Some species typically die from starvation soon after larger plastics fill their stomachs.
Prevention
Wearing clothes made strictly from natural fibers can rid your washing machine of the chance to drain away synthetic microfibers. The following list presents the most common types of natural fibers used for clothing:
Linen
Cotton
Silk
Wool
Hemp
Alpaca
Cashmere
Giving up your synthetic clothing can be challenging, especially when those clothes happen to be favored over others. If this is the case for you, there’s still a chance you can reduce the amount of synthetic microfibers that drain from your washing machine.
Some companies sell washing machine balls designed to catch microfibers and allow you to safely discard those microfibers in the trash. Others sell a mesh-like bag for storing your synthetic clothes as you wash them, trapping microfibers that you can easily take out of the bag and into the trash.
Synthetic textiles—knitted-polyester towels, woven acrylic bed sheets—can also be replaced with textiles made from natural fibers.
Use food-grade stainless steel water bottles as an alternative to disposable plastic bottles. Millions of Americans each year purchase packs after packs of purified water bottles when they can easily save money by switching to refillable stainless steel bottles that last a lifetime.
Purchase compostable appliances—bags, food containers, utensils, food wrap—rather than conventional plastic appliances.
It’s possible to reuse disposable plastic products as many times as you’d like, but it’s generally unsafe because over time these plastic products will release microplastics and contaminate your food and drinks. Plastics are also subject to releasing more microplastics if they’re exposed to sunlight.
Abstaining from single-use plastics is a difficult lifestyle to commit to, since plastics are ubiquitous in every form imaginable. However, a lifestyle free from single-use plastics can prove rewarding not only for yourself but for all living creatures alike.