[sktrdie]

Apart from food packaging, one great way to easily ingest plastic is to use synthetic clothing. Just a basic rubbing of a synthetic sleeve on your nose causes thousands of polyester particles to release in thin air, readily breathable.

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

[ericmcer]

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.

[jabl]

> 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).

[jerlam]

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...

[schiffern]

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/

[haccount]

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.

[throwaway19972]

> 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).

[smm11]

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.

[SlightlyLeftPad]

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.

[andai]

>not buying new clothes you don't need

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

[rustcleaner]

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

[afh1]

Hum, almost all of my t-shirts are 100% cotton, or at least that's what the label says. I use mostly the same clothes from 15 years ago so maybe synthetic is more common nowadays? I think the only t-shirts I own that are not 100% cotton are those I've got for free on things like marathons and hackathons. Does it contain phthalate? I have no idea, there is no label saying what they are made of. Probably polyester. Does it have phthalates in any meaningful concentration? This review says basically that "it varies a lot" and "needs further study". https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138266892...

[resoluteteeth]

Interestingly Table 4 in that link shows "Plain weave cotton" and "polyster" having similar levels of phthalates.

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?

[dghughes]

I wear mostly the same clothes too from 15 years ago I'd agree synthetic is more common nowadays? Shirts, underwear, hoodies, jackets, relzed fit stretchy pants/trousers all seem to be something just not cotton anyway.

[brookside]

I recall the cotton tees of my youth being stiff and terrible-feeling.

[buildbot]

I hate how normalized this is. Breathing in a difficult to break down plastic dust is not something that seems healthy.

[potato3732842]

Nitpick:

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.

[kulahan]

Nobody is going around purposely breathing in plastic dust, there's been dust everywhere forever, and breathing in dust is a natural and unavoidable part of life.

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.

[zw7]

I think about this every time I clean out the dryer lint filter and a plume of lint dust comes off of it. I try to avoid breathing it in but it’s likely some is making it into my airways.

[nosianu]

Try shaking out a piece of clothing in full sunlight. It helps you see the millions of future dust particles that will come off your clothing.

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.

[mike_ivanov]

Besides containing microplastics, the dryer lint is also radioactive

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35990858

[faitswulff]

Since getting used to them during Covid, I've continued wearing masks for situations just like this.

[jerlam]

The lint is also the residue from your clothes being worn away. If you can, consider not using the dryer at all, especially for synthetic clothing which air dry quickly compared to cotton.

[ninininino]

Get a high-end vacuum with a hepa filter (such as the 0.3 micro rated S-24035 by DeWalt) and turn it on and hold it near the lint trap panel as you open the panel up.

[mschuster91]

> Not just clothing, but also bedding is a huge issue. With pillows, mattresses and towels mostly made of synthetic fibers.

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...

[brnt]

I often wonder about carpet or seats and couches. Also made of all manner of synthetic fabrics. Even besides the effects of living in the same space flame retardants slowly gas off over the decades, we rarely deep clean any of this, so when we sit down a cloud of craps wafts up into our lungs.

I prefer noncarpets, but hard seating of course not.

[JumpCrisscross]

> a basic rubbing of a synthetic sleeve on your nose causes thousands of polyester particles to release in thin air, readily breathable

Source?

[sktrdie]

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200309221340.h...

[botanical]

Some of my polyester t-shirts have lasted more than 10 years without any loss in colour or quality, it's a damn shame they cause microplastics since it's probably better that people don't buy clothing every month if clothes lasted longer.

[Tade0]

My mattress cover is like that, as it's made from polyester. When I pull it from the dryer it produces an invisible, but irritating cloud of particles.

All that while most of the shavings accumulate in the lint collector, so it could have been even worse.

[nikolay]

For at least 10 years now, I only by 100% cotton or cotton-linen blend, or 100% wool - nothing else! Yet, there's so many sources of microplastics that can't be eliminated, unfortunately!

[_w1tm]

> My usual instinct is: try rubbing the synthetic material; if it releases thousands of particles in thin air, stay away from it

How thin should the air be and how do you measure the particles?

[hammock]

Are there phthalates in polyester clothing?

[SoftTalker]

Those fleece blankets and jackets too, they are made from recycled soda bottles.

[29athrowaway]

And plastic shower liners.

[kazinator]

Just look at the lint filter of a dryer after just one load.

[binarymax]

It’s frustrating how hard it is now to buy pure cotton or <gasp> wool, from a store. Even if it’s 3% synthetic it’s still not what I’m looking for.

[mandmandam]

Yep. Specifically, why are 100% cotton socks so ridiculously hard to find now?

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-...