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Comment by ericmcer | Hacker News Reader

Clothing industry has somehow gotten by unscathed during all the environmental awareness that has spread in the past 20 years. I am pretty sure clothes are the #1 cause of the microplastics that have inundated the ocean and our water supply.

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.

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> Clothing industry has somehow gotten by unscathed during all the environmental awareness that has spread in the past 20 years. I am pretty sure clothes are the #1 cause of the microplastics that have inundated the ocean and our water supply.

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).

Pretty sure PP was referring to mainstream criticism and concerns which tend to be about plastics in foods, etc. but less acknowledgement of the problem of fast fashion switching from cotton to plastic based textiles.

France passed a law back in 2020 to require new washing machines to have a microplastics filter by 2025:

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...

Maybe we should subsidize plastic-free fibers instead. Cotton, hemp, wool...

Or perhaps we could all agree to stop wearing so much clothing in warm climates? I have a hard time believing that out of all mammals that ever came to be on this planet, we just so happened to be the only ones with this unique need that our biology failed to provide us with.

Though I wouldn't expect the average consumer to take a full course in organic chemistry, perhaps we can train the public to see benzene rings.

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.

> perhaps we can train the public to see benzene rings But benzene rings are everywhere, from deadly poison to essential nutrients.

And in fact, some chemicals that behave very differently may look extremely similar on paper. Especially when it comes to biology.

Linen; linen is made from the Flax plant.

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.

You still have massive downsides to new cotton or wool clothes. There's just less of the micro plastic downside. Clothing is just a place where we take a massive hit on everything from carbon output to micro plastics.

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.

> for clothing repair to work you would need to disincentivize buying new clothes

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.

Higher quality clothes like in the past might be nice. Stuff seems to fall apart so quickly these days.

Older clothes weren't just made better, people also took care of them better. Partly because of cost, but also culture -- fewer changes in fashion trends with slower and more local communication, cheap labor to launder your clothes by hand (which puts much less wear on the garment). Also a culture of repairing and mending (also easier to do this when you have fewer things to occupy your free time).

Yes. But really, it was much worse in many ways. A 100 years ago, say, the people doing clothes repair for a living were desperately poor, and often being single women they often had to resort to prostitution to feed themselves as the income from repairing clothes simply wasn't enough.

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.

sad truth: dryers absolutely destroy clothes.

The problem isn't really "buying new clothes," since most of the microplastics are released in the laundry. Sewage treatment plants aren't designed to remove them, so they get released with the discharge water. It can also clog up septic leachfields.

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.

[1] https://www.filtrol.net/

[2] https://planetcare.org/

> I wish they made comparable products for the dryer.

Isn't that just the lint filter? Every dryer I've seen has one.

Those are probably not fine enough (in terms of filtration) and retrofit may be difficult if it restricts airflow.

There's an entire big and celebrated business sector that spends every working hour taking intact plastic products and grinds then into fine shreds, a process likely to contribute more than a fair share to microplastic dissemination. Maybe worth investigating, a good candidate for more microplastic release than the clothing industry.

Name of that business sector? Plastics recycling.

Plastics recycling also kinda barely exists. Only 5% of plastic in the US is recycled, the whole thing was a greenwashing operation by oil companies to encourage additional consumption. Realistically putting the plastic deep underground back from whence the hydrocarbons came is not a bad sequestration strategy.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

The way we used to "recycle" plastic was to put it on a container ship along with glass and aluminum and send it to China. Once it arrived, they would recycle the glass and aluminum and bury or burn the plastic. We reduced the quantity of (valuable) aluminum and glass over time until China got mad and told us to stop shipping them just the garbage (plastic). That was largely the end of the show.

The US is at the back of the pack though, in Europe some countries recycle more than half of plastic.

Do they recycle or just burn it for energy?

Countries like Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland incinerated 50-80% of their plastic waste. Germany incinerated around 50%. Countries in Eastern and Southern Europe generally had lower incineration rates and higher landfill rates. Approximately 42% of plastic waste in Europe was being incinerated in waste-to-energy facilities.

Recycling is not burning.

Same for aluminum, which is highly recyclable. A ridiculous amount of it ends up in landfills for no reason other than people can't be fucked.

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.

> Plastic recycling is just another American "we tried nothing and are out of ideas."

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.

> 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.

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).

It hardly moves the needle - apart from often needing huge amounts of awareness education that busy people hardly have time to think about, there usually aren’t enough affordable alternative options for ‘personal responsibility’ to work, but when you regulate to reduce the sale of the bad stuff it just forces it to happen.

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.

Vintage clothing stores are a great resource to combat this. It's sad how expensive many are, but you can also try thrift stores for clothes.

Oh no, I love my lululemon clothes. New fear unlocked. It makes sense though, these clothes still generate lint and it can only be thousands of synthetic particles and dirt.

>not buying new clothes you don't need

Pretty sure I don't need the ones made of microplastics!

With luck, maybe some new nudity tolerance movements can be fomented. :^D

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