Pick Your Clothes–Doing Laundry Can Be Deadly for Clams, Mollusks
“Everyone loves the feeling of clean clothes—except maybe sea animals. Each load of laundry you do may be pouring hundreds of thousands of tiny pollutants into the water, which are then ingested by clams, mollusks and other sea creatures around the world.”
“For the new study, Thompson and Imogen Napper washed fabric samples of different types: acrylic, polyester and a polyester-cotton blend. Then, they filtered the washing machine’s wastewater to count the fibers. They found that acrylic cloth, found in clothes from sweaters to microfleece jackets, sheds fibers three to four times faster than the poly-cotton blend. For instance, if you washed 6 kilograms of the same fleece, 700,000 fibers per load of laundry could be dumped into the wastewater stream.”
“And those clothes, it turns out, can be hugely variable when it comes to how many fibers they shed. “Some fabrics were releasing up to 3 times more fibers than others,” says Richard Thompson, a professor at Plymouth University in the U.K. and co-author of the new study, which was published online September 25 in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin. “It does suggest that there are things manufacturers can do to reduce the numbers of fibers [released].””
Some “solutions” are suggested, but do not go very far. No talk of abandoning plastic for clothing, for instance.
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