Hacker News Reader

Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

This comment contradicts itself: if microplastics in clothing are a serious issue, then we should be looking seriously at clothes that degrade without producing microplastics.

(All clothing degrades; presumably you don’t object to wool or accuse wool sweaters of planned obsolescence.)

View on HN

Or we can just burn the clothes. Almost no clothing in Europe, biodegradable or not, ends up in the ocean.

My understanding is that much of the West’s second-hand and overstock clothes ends up in countries like Ghana, where it does end up in waterways[1]. This has presumably increased over time due to fast fashion, which is a large market in Europe (like in the US).

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jun/05/y...

Fast fashion is horrible. That article really shows on aspect of it. It has turned a large chunk of a recycling process into dumping.

You really need to cite a source on this subject, measuring the industrial waste is very difficult and any articles state that "we found this but anyway, it's difficult to track efficiently the industry wastes".

Microplastics are emitted from clothing and flushed into the waste water system, and from there to oceans, every time you do laundry. This is considered to be the main source of microplastic pollution, including in the EU unless they managed something revolutionary that I'm not aware of.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43023-x

Absolutely shit tons of fluff comes off off polyester clothes and ends up in the drain.

We could probably design washing machines to filter it better, granted.

So, like ... cotton?

Sure. But the reality is that cotton is expensive and resource intensive compared to other materials; absent a global effort to ban plastic clothes, it seems worthwhile to make those clothes less environmentally damaging.

Cotton also shrinks when wet and has poor thermal properties - polymer blend fabrics perform better in the cold, and are lighter and cheaper than wool. Goretex is wonderful stuff, but its also made of '"forever-plastics" and is known to slowly leach into runoff. Finding a polymer that can be cleanly manufactured for a competitive price with similar properties would be wonderful, as long as theres also a method for it to degrade safely when discarded.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com