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Comment by lend000 | Hacker News Reader

It's an innovative approach, albeit only a partial solution. Unfortunately, not all plastics are polar [0]. And the micro-plastic pollution I see most and feel like I ingest the most of is dust from my own clothing (primarily polyester based, which is somewhat polar). Everyone always says dust is just your skin, but I can see the color of clothes I wear frequently on dust and lint that accumulates in the house.

I also wonder about how many cell membranes would get stuck in the nonpolar layer and if that would have a meaningful impact on local microbiota/algae compared to the amount of plastic absorbed in the process.

[0] http://www.appstate.edu/~clementsjs/journalarticles/zeus_die...

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You are correct. The majority of micro plastic pollution to soil and water comes from synthetic clothing.

Cotton, wool, linen, hemp.. we have options people!

Right but...how did you extrapolate from indoor lint to all soil and water? What about all the other non-clothing plastic and rubber noone wants to pay for proper recycling or incineration?

Washing clothes, I would assume.

Washing clothes sends microplastics to the water treatment plant. Notwithstanding leaky sewer systems (and especially combined stormwater systems), that's a centralized problem that can be solved in one spot.

Drying your clothes is a point source problem. Every dryer vent is spewing microplastics into every yard and street. The lint trap only catches the largest fibers.

I heard once from a museum worker that the dust that settles on exhibits is somewhat blue, due to the prevalence of denim jeans.

I’ve seen plenty of blue dust in the cracks of my AirPods case when I put them in my jeans, so I’m not surprised.

When I bought my jeans from H&M, I would sometimes find blue dust on things I kept in my pocket. After switching to a brand that uses higher quality cotton (Nudie Jeans), I have never experienced this.

Durable cotton has longer fibres so that they won’t break off as easily as the short fibred varieties. I guess that is the reason why.

I wish there were (or I knew) a good objective quality metrics for clothing/clothing brands.

It's a skill you can practise. Go to a second hand clothing store and feel the fabrics. Inspect the seams, zippers and what have you. Make mental note of brand labels. You'll develop a sense of quality.

And a second hand store, specifically, because the clothes there being used reinforces the survivorship bias - bad clothes don't make it through recycling.

How to assess the quality of garments (2014) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20503194

https://goodonyou.eco/ seem reasonable.

Price correlates greatly with basic material quality, although platoes quite soon after certain threshold.

I wanted to respond but couldn’t find the words. Then I read in the article [0] linked in a sibling comment:

“ Now, what's important to note is that the quality and the price of an item are not always related. Some types of items are easier to manufacture and get right than others, which is why it is totally possible to find certain well-made items at affordable shops. At the same time, just because an item is very pricey, that sadly does not always mean that the manufacturer used all of that extra money to up the quality of the garment.”

Edit - citing the source [0]: https://anuschkarees.com/blog/2014/05/01/how-to-assess-the-q...

I don't think we're in disagreement. My point was that $50 pair of jeans tends to be better quality than an $10 one, although the difference with an $500 pair is not anywhere as dramatic.

Sure, but the $50 pair might just as well be worse than the $10 pair, they just spent $30/pair more on marketing to convince the buyer they’re something special. Then pocketing $10 more a pair than the cheaper but just-as-good version.

Same with the $500 pair.

It’s just difficult to tell if one can’t evaluate quality oneself.

It may be worse sure, but it more often is better. The 'correlates' part in my reply above.

This from personal experience, or is there a study on it?

Organic cotton has struggled with fiber length, making the big picture view of cotton quite a bit more complicated.

It's gotten better, but I had some early Patagonia organic cotton jeans that basically began to disintegrate. There are some hemp-cotton blends that are fairly soft.

Every time I have to clean the lint out of the power adapter for my iPhone I ask out loud how a company that has been run by two consecutive denim wearers hasn't had to solve the pocket lint problem.

It seems like for dust in the home you'd want to look at the things people might do for allergies, like maybe an air purifier and robot vacuum? (Not to mention dusting.)

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