Not just clothing, but also bedding is a huge issue. With pillows, mattresses and towels mostly made of synthetic fibers.
My usual instinct is: try rubbing the synthetic material; if it releases thousands of particles in thin air, stay away from it
We have been heavily pushed to drive less, recycle more, and use less water, but I have not seen messaging about not buying new clothes you don't need.
Surprise surprise, it has actually been studied. One recent review article of the field:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl2746
From figure 2b) we can see that while microplastics from synthetic fibres are certainly an issue, they are far from #1. Dwarfed by tires, paint, and macroplastics (large plastic pieces thrown away slowly grinding down into microplastics e.g. by wave action).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2020-00137...
It has also begun to subsidize the clothing repair industry:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/13/business/france-shoe-clothing...
Counting electron delocalization density and reactivity can be a rule of thumb for DNA mutation.
Basically a, "Does your chemical look like this? Maybe consume less of it." infographic.
And in fact, some chemicals that behave very differently may look extremely similar on paper. Especially when it comes to biology.
Natural fibers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_fiber
Green textiles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_textile
There are newer more sustainable production processes for various natural fibers.
TIL that there are special laundry detergents for synthetic fabrics like most activewear like jerseys; and that fabric softener attracts mosquitos and adheres to synthetic fibers causing stank.
Another issue is clothing repair. I think the clothing repair thing is kind of brilliant. But for clothing repair to work you would need to disincentivize buying new clothes. Which subsidizing clothing would work against.
Why? I repair clothes. I also like buying new ones. In between I ruin and lose items, or find that I no longer wish to wear them for purely stylistic reasons.
I do think that from an environmental standpoint we should repair and recycle clothes a lot more than we do, but lets not romanticize the past. The small clothes repair businesses disappeared for a reason as living standards improved. Furthermore, today factory production of clothes is incredibly efficient and tends to be done in low-income countries, further making it even harder to restart some kind of clothes repair industry in high-income countries.
They do make purpose-built products to filter microplastic lint from laundry[1][2], but a more hacker approach is to just search for "pool filter."
I wish they made comparable products for the dryer.
Isn't that just the lint filter? Every dryer I've seen has one.
Name of that business sector? Plastics recycling.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
Plastic recycling is just another American "we tried nothing and are out of ideas." Much of the lack of recycling for plastics, when it comes to bottles, isn't some grand conspiracy so much as people just throwing bottles in the trash or on the side of the road, because:
* There aren't omnipresent recycling bins to go alongside trash cans.
* There aren't local programs for recycling pick up.
* Some people can't be bothered and the government isn't punching them in the face, as it should.
Only a half dozen states have a can/bottle deposit, even. Each state should be required to have deposits and municipal recycling pickup in any city of appreciable size, and heavy penalties for littering, or all sorts of federal funding should be withheld.
not sure where this comes from -- this statement is definitely not accurate. Is recycling of plastics "going well" ? no. Please note that USA is composed of States, and then Counties. In the USA law system, counties have the most jurisdiction over most waste laws. Some State laws override those, including toxics handling; then Federal laws including interstate commerce (transportation) and many more toxics regulations.
Counties do vary dramatically. In fact most counties in the whole USA are different in important respects. There is no single USA this way. Overall, recycling is very dependent on economics. It costs money to recycle, and sometimes you get some of it back on materials markets. The costs to the environment are not accurate with respect to markets.
The comment then proceeds to dictate advice to "each state" and that is never going to happen, by definition, for legal matters under the jurisdiction of states, in simple terms.
It's there if you follow the right people on social media.
Campaigns that center around personal responsibility, however, aren't ever going to work, and there's obvious reasons why people are willing to pay to push this narrative but not the buying fewer clothes one (at least here in the US).
Often regulation forces better alternatives to reach the scale where economy of scale can make it affordable, whereas with the ‘personal responsibility’ model the alternatives will often just stay the far more expensive, premium option.
Pretty sure I don't need the ones made of microplastics!
I don't think phtalates are needed as plasticizers in polyster, so I guess they are coming from the dyes or something else used to treat the fabrics, meaning that the choice of cotton or polyster may not matter for phthalates specifically?
All else being equal you're generally safer being exposed to stable things that don't break down than unstable things that happily react with all sorts of things (and tend to meddle with the chemical processes required for life).
If you get to choose between breathing tires and milk jugs pick the milk jugs every time.
There's a similar paradox in nuclear radiation. (Sometimes expressed with a puzzle about differently radioactive cookies and what to do with each.)
Gamma rays are scary because it takes a lot of lead shielding to even slow them down... but that also means that they aren't stopping to interact with things--like yourself--as they travel.
Alpha particles seem relatively safe because they don't travel far and are blocked by your skin... But that means they're doing something to that skin, and luckily for you any damage is being dealt to already-dead cells on the outside.
But if you had to put one of them inside your body, it's quite possible the gamma ray emitter would be the safer option, simply because more of its energy would escape harmlessly.
That's definitely the case with Polonium-210. Even though it emits alpha particles, it's very dangerous to ingest.
Unless the other thing is asbestos or generally any kind of mineral/anorganic material - pneumoconiosis [1] is nasty in all its variants. There is no mechanism at all for your body to break down or expel anorganic contaminants in your lungs.
> If you get to choose between breathing tires and milk jugs pick the milk jugs every time.
Well, plastic, glass or metal, no matter what the jugs are made of, they'll hurt your lungs just like the tire dust will.
I think that's somewhat misleading, the lung has a mucus layer and cilia to move particles caught in the mucus up and out. But I'll agree that it's not a completely robust system. Anything that gets past or can't be moved by the mucus layer is going to be a problem, especially particles that can't be broken down by the macrophages.
Yup. I was thinking of heading off comments like yours by mentioning silicosis or lead poisoning but didn't want to clutter up a simple clarification.
Anyway, still mostly safer than "happy to react with things" compounds which is why people like you get to make comments about it here and now vs it simply being a thing everyone has accepted is not good to breath for hundreds of years (like certain wood dusts)
Even my mountain bike tyres now contain graphene which doesn't sound like a good idea for the sake of an unnoticeable improvement, and prob only as a racer. Seems a case of new jargon selling more. So they keep adding new compounds.
Natural rubber is poly-cis-isoprene, synthetic rubbers are a mix of petroleum-derived polymers.
This premise only exists in a synthetic hypothetical universe.
What is important is to take start with a very real problem that should be resolved in this universe, then project the discussion into a very close but different one and argue there.
Now it doesn't matter if you win or lose in that universe because it doesn't matter. It isn't our reality.
Hypothetically speaking.
The person you originally quoted did mark their post as a nitpick.
What, exactly, do you think is normalized here? That people wear clothing? That people didn't throw out every polyester fiber the moment somebody said plastic can break down into small pieces? That people aren't freaking out over a danger that we know roughly nothing about so far?
People really need to stop finding excuses to freak out over things.
Over the years I found that of all the dust in my home the vast majority comes from my clothing. I deduced that because the collected dust looks the same as what I find in the dryer, and it feels like cotton too (my by far most warn kind of fiber).
That means rooms are full of tiny particles from your clothes, if I assume that my home is not an anomaly (and why should it be).
Direct sunlight really helps to see how much dust there is all around us, and how with every little movement we create more. That does not even show the particles too small to be seen. The difference is gigantic - without that sunlight you don't see any dust and think the air is clean.
I'm not too concerned, since humanity must have dealt with this for a long time. Particles from fire especially, and there are lots coming from even the tiniest flame. My main worry would be chemicals we add to clothes, but given that by now we ingest plastic pretty much all the time, with every meal, with every breath, we just have to wait and see. I don't see a way to end this long-running experiment.
I’m sure those cheap shitty masks were absolutely full of wholesome healthy microplastic.
Preach. I vacuum my bedsheets every day because my cats are insane shedders and I'd otherwise get breaded with cat fur, but the vacuum is full with so much what is clearly not cat fur...
I prefer noncarpets, but hard seating of course not.
Source?
All that while most of the shavings accumulate in the lint collector, so it could have been even worse.
How thin should the air be and how do you measure the particles?
It used to be that they were a little more expensive - now you need to go online to find them.
'Fun' fact - the average brain has about 7 grams of microplastic [0] in it now, up 50% from 2016. At that rate...
SEVEN FUCKING GRAMS. Guys this is beyond stupid.
Even if plastic were totally inert, as I've heard people insist with certainty (where are they getting these ideas!), 7 grams of plastic in your brain is terrifying.
0 - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/23/health/plastics-in-brain-...
My theory is that it's because of Amazon reviews. For most socks on Amazon, there will be at least one reviewer posting pictures of how their socks got holes after a few days of wearing. These reviewers are ridiculous and seem to have sandpaper for flooring, sweat corrosive acid, or deliberately wear down these socks just to post the review. I've bought many different socks from Amazon and none of them get holes even after years of wearing them.
Anyway, I think that seems to have spooked socks manufacturers.
Why do you find that terrifying, if it’s inert?
To the downvoters: This is a genuine question.
When you extrapolate 100,000-fold from uncalibrated micro-scale experiments, you get insane results, but the typical internet reader doesn't get past the abstract of the paper and instantly activates panic mode, instead of questioning the insanity.
The correct amount of brain plastic is 0 grams. Zero. This is a problem and it's very clearly getting worse.
Why would I have to explain that to someone with a PHD in biology? So weird.
You've been secretly living with this horrible condition for long enough for it to happen -- remember, this is happening a nanogram at a time, for years and years! This is not a fast process!
Are you dead? No? Hm.
Perhaps you ought to rethink your priors. I'm not saying you're absolutely wrong -- maybe the right answer really is that "0 is the right number". But maybe the answer is that it doesn't matter that much, and you're exaggerating the impact. More to the point, when you simply leap to the most exaggerated conclusion from a bad paper with sketchy methodology, you're not doing science, or being data-driven -- you're just panicking.
Why assume? There's multiple studies showing microplastics in human brains. Are they all "sketchy" too?
What organ in the body hasn't been shown to be contaminated? Significant and increasing levels have been found in lungs, livers, kidneys, spleens, intestines, hearts, placentas, blood, fat tissue, lymph nodes... All sketchy studies in your view? No? Then why the exception for brains?
Microplastics have been found from the top of Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. They're in 60-80% of all wild species examined. Sketchy? Exaggerated? Bring the data if you have it. It would want to be very strong stuff..
To loudly cast doubt on a study like this, and claim you know the weight of microplastic in people's brains is under 3.5g, you'd want to bring some substance... You haven't brought any; none at all.
> Are you dead? No? Hm.
Do I really need to explain that health is a spectrum - that 'alive' is not equivalent to healthy? That "not immediately sick" isn't the same as thriving? Binary thinking isn't very helpful on issues like this, and it's hard to believe you're arguing in good faith when you say things like this as if you've made a substantive point.
> Perhaps you ought to rethink your priors.
Which priors are those - that I don't want foreign substances accumulating in my brain, much less most brains on the planet?
Why would I? This is a plausibly catastrophic scenario, and you've brought absolutely no evidence that it isn't. None. At all.
> maybe the answer is that it doesn't matter that much, and you're exaggerating the impact.
I don't want to roll the dice on this one, and I think that's the only sensible approach. We have all sorts of alternatives; they're just not quite as 'cheap'.
People have posted elsewhere in the thread about a growing body of scientific links between nasty health outcomes and higher levels of microplastic in people's fleshy bits. You ignored that though... Why? ... Do you have a vested interest? Are you scared that this could actually be an issue, and you don't want to face it? What are your priors - that if you haven't keeled over yet then you're healthy?
> maybe the right answer really is that "0 is the right number"
It is. There's no conceivable advantage from having more than that.
> maybe the answer is that it doesn't matter that much, and you're exaggerating the impact
It's baffling to me that anyone would assume that it's fine and dandy that we're finding increasing amounts of plastic in human brains, or even deny it. To me, that's a ludicrous leap of faith; requiring an utterly unhinged level of naivety or optimism.
> maybe ... you're just panicking.
... You remind me of that old cartoon about climate change - "What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"
In any case, in one study [0], "researchers looked at 12 brain samples from people who had died with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. These brains contained up to 10 times more plastic by weight than healthy samples." Another [1] found "nanoplastics accelerate the aggregation of β-amyloid peptides" and that they exacerbate "the neurotoxicity induced by low-concentration peptides".
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/21/...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
A huge number of people have implements in their bodies (in their teeth, most often), and much more than seven grams of “foreign stuff” in their stomach and intestines all the time, so that by itself doesn’t seem anything to be terrified of.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/21/...
That doesn't seem very complicated, does it?
It being in my brain is an adverse effect. Inert material in the brain is a problem itself.
Do you want inert rocks in your car engine? Taking up space, interfering with natural processes, etc?
The brain is incredibly complex; far, far, far beyond our current understanding. You don't want anything in there that isn't supposed to be, and plastic isn't fucking supposed to be there.
And, did you miss the part where this is up 50% from only 8 years ago?
... Tbh I'm aghast that anyone needs this explained to them.