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Comment by makerofspoons | Hacker News Reader

Or we could stop making clothes out of materials that shed microplastics. And while we're at it, cotton too for the vast amounts of water it uses. Industrial hemp and linen are far more sustainable options. Tencel looks like a great replacement for cotton and uses wood cellulose.

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Cotton is softer than hemp and it's lighter than hemp. And unlike either of them, cotton is slightly elastic.

If you've ever had linen sheets you know that they get softer and looser over time.

There are companies that specialise in making clothing out of flax, but a quick look at their designs showcase just how bad linen is for clothing. The only linen garments that resemble the cut / silhouette of their standard counterparts are blouses and dresses.

I'd love to see a comparison of water required to make a square yard of cotton textile vs rayon (tencel is a form of rayon)

I don’t care about technical qualities, for me I find hemp cloth to be far more comfortable to wear. Softer on the skin, longer wearing, easier to wash and iron.

I go out of my way to get hemp clothing, especially when the options are cotton/plastic blends.

Or we could stop making plastic.

Or at least the 90% of it making junk.

Even if we separate it, it still exists, as does basically all the plastic we've ever produced. Even separated, at the rate we're producing it, wherever we put it will overflow.

wherever we put it will overflow.

The scarcity of landfill space is a myth sparked by the infamous "garbage barge", which nobody accepted because it came from the NY mafia and was getting too much attention, not because there was no room for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobro_4000

This Planet Money episode is a good listen: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/739893511/episode-925-a-mob-b...

If only it all made it to landfills, but the most polluted spots on Earth include south sea islands thousands of miles from population centers, ocean gyres, and so on.

Once you make something unhealthy, to suggest that (leaky) places to put some of them are abundant misses the point. They're unhealthy and the overwhelming majority unnecessary.

Or we can chill out, enjoy the time we have left here and let nature take its course. There is no promise from nature that humanity need exist, nor that it need keep existing. Yes we can add 10% to our lifespan by getting ourselves all worked up over microplastics and climate change but the universe still wins in the long run.

I'm no expert, but I always figured that environmental sustainability would help humanity a bit more than a 10% boost in lifespan.

In Europe (yes, generalizing an entire continent) we generally avoid landfills and instead burn anything nontoxic that doesn't go to recycling. It's a great way to produce electricity and have all produced gases in one place where you can filter them. Plastic burns just fine. Obviously we try to recycle it first, but a lot of it still ends up burned. The ash that's left over is used in construction, but plastic doesn't even leave ash.

From what I've been told, that's basically the plastic industry's philosophy: it was energy that took a side trip as a bottle on the way to the furnace.

But, do what you want with that anecdote (toxic, wasteful, unsustainable, etc)

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