[ynac]

I'm down to just a few sweat shirts and over shirts from the 80s, but they are hanging in there. Both the colors and the fabric. When the subject comes up with friends who ask about a particular shirt I joke, "The cotton was tougher back then". Recently, I've had jeans, shirts, and even socks that didn't make it through a single summer.

Is anyone else freaked out about cleaning their dryer's lint filter given all the new fabric materials? I'm putting together a dryer-vac system to keep it from billowing into the air of our small laundry room.

[ravenstine]

I can confirm that you really don't want to breathe in any of that crap.

A year and a half ago I developed symptoms of what was some form of bronchitis. Lots of mucus, constantly coughing, etc. I was pretty freaking sick. I tend to wait some things like this out, but it wasn't going away so I went to a doctor and got some medications including albuterol and some kind of steroid (prednisone, I think). It got a little more manageable, but didn't seem to be getting any better.

One day, I realized how much of a dumbass I was the whole time.

The apartment I was living in had a laundry room, but it was tiny and I got tired of both hauling laundry up and down multiple flights of stairs and having to fight for time with the few machines that were there. I bought a small washer and dryer pair from Black & Decker which were designed for apartment living. Kinda off topic, but there were no hookups in my unit, so I had to jerryrig a water connection using some collapsible garden hoses that connected to my shower and its drain. Was kinda hilarious but worked great.

I made the mistake of thinking that I could just allow the dryer to blow through two sets of lint traps and have a fan blow air out of the window to manage moisture and remaining lint making it through. What I didn't realize was how inadequate the traps were. Because I worked from home, I spent a lot of time in that bedroom, including when the dryer was running. I was breathing in all sorts of stuff without knowing it.

Once I stopped hanging out in that room while the dryer was running, bought an air purifier, and made sure to frequently clean my apartment of dust, my symptoms rapidly started to go away.

If I had to do all of that again, and I couldn't just have the dryer blow directly out the window, I would find some way to have it do a second pass through a HEPA filter, perhaps after drying the air with something like calcium chloride.

I shudder to think of all the microplastic fibers that remain somewhere in my body.

[fpoling]

We have a washing machine that also has a drier function. It dries much slower than a standalone drier as it consumes water during the drying circle to cool and condense the hot air from the clothes. But the big plus is that it works in mostly closed cycle reusing the air. And there is no need to clean the filter, just unclog the sink pipes once in few months.

[d3ad1ysp0rk]

Also definitely look into ventless dryers - while not as quick as a vented one, the heat pump versions have come a long way from the classic condenser styles of the past.

[userbinator]

Inhaling large quantities of any type of fiber is not good, cotton included: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byssinosis

But if anything I'd think plastic fibers are less likely to have any effects, because they're inert.

[yowayb]

I got a drying closet. It's basically a heater in a tent with a few vents. It takes almost twice as long as a similarly sized tumble-drying machine, but absolutely nothing but warm, moist air is exhausted into the room. I even use it to supplement a space heater.

[bigfatkitten]

Your symptoms are pretty similar to what I experienced after using a dry powder fire extinguisher in a confined space a few years ago.

[ajcp]

I'd be interested to know why buying, installing, jerryrigging, and (presumably every time you did a load of laundry) hooking and unhooking collapsible hosing for a washer and dryer in a bedroom you worked from, was in any way more convenient or cheaper or useful than just using the communal laundry room or a dedicated laundry service?

[strbean]

If you were never a smoker, hopefully your mucociliary escalator can deal with all the lint you inhaled!

[jazzyjackson]

There's still good fabrics out there you just have to pay for them. I've mostly replaced my wardrobe now with natural undyed cottons and wools from the likes of "unbleached apparel" and "industry of all nations". There is cotton grown in new mexico, socks spun in north carolina. "Filson" makes a few things in Seattle. Don't skip the stuff made in Peru or India neither.

[vyaa]

Do you have any brand recommendations?

[strbean]

I really like the look of those unbleached + un-dyed shirts, but Unbleached Apparel and Industry of All Nations don't seem to have tall sizes :(

[IAmBroom]

You are actually seeing something the linked article doesn't even mention: fiber length.

Not all cotton is created equally. "Egyptian cotton" was long prized because of the long fiber lengths. Cotton fibers are very smooth and slick, and only stay together in thread because of friction along their length as they lay with neighbor fibers (often twisted, where friction becomes exponential instead of linear). Short-fiber cotton is cheaper and easier to source; ergo, cheaper clothing tends to be made of it. Short fibers are also much more likely to slip within the thread under heat, lubrication, and motion (washing and drying). Obviously, they are also more likely to completely fall out of the thread, creating lint.

This is really only true for cotton and very similar fibers. Linen fibers are generally all multiple inches long, so there's less of a quality issue (they are made from rotting away everything but the longitudinal support fibers of the plant stalks).

Wool varies greatly in surface texture, especially after modern chemical processing, and fiber length isn't an issue because the fibers are also inch-long or better. It shrinks, however, because its friction is SO HIGH that it won't give up (stretch back) once it gets bound up.

Silk fibers super slick, but are several yards/meters long; a single cocoon is made from a single thread. They are much slicker than cotton (and therefore harder to hand-spin), but by the time they are made into thread they have plenty of surface friction maintaining their position in the thread.

Artificial fibers are as long as the production shift lasts, so effectively infinite.

[coryrc]

Unfortunately about linen, they often "cottonize" it to use on cotton machines. They just chop that long fiber into short ones, negating much of the benefit. I haven't figured out how to tell the difference.

[troyvit]

I don't have any clothes as old as yours though for sure, but line drying generally helps your clothes last longer. I'm so glad I live in Colorado. It's a warm winter, but it takes like 3 hours to dry stuff on the line (especially synthetics). Of course that means all my synthetic fibers are literally billowing into the air I guess. Still, we've been going without a dryer for about five years now and I've had no regrets.

[owlninja]

My strategy forever is to wash all my shirts, put them in the dryer on low for 5 minutes, then hang them all up in a doorway overnight. My clothes last much longer this way and never get wrinkled.

[jarjoura]

I had a european friend introduce me to indoor drying racks, and since, anything I plan to keep long term, I hang dry as well. I've found my clothes last longer and look nicer. Only thing I've found doesn't work well are towels.

[dylan604]

I use my line in Texas, and 3 hours would see the clothes go from wet -> dry -> melted! And that's in the shade!

Unfortunately, the line dried clothes are not soft, so I end up fluffing them in the drier using the air dry setting. Still cheaper than running the heating element, but hasn't eliminated the drier for me.

[lo_zamoyski]

Or, if you are using a dryer, keep the heat low to moderate.

[epolanski]

I have recently started refusing to buy all of this plastic filled clothes. If I see any % of it I don't buy it. Period.

I spend much more upfront for clothes, but I gain a lot long term. Clothes don't look terrible after few washings and they tend to last forever.

[jjice]

Why? Polyester (as one plastic based fiber) gets a lot of flack because low quality clothes tend to use it, but polyester can be a fantastic fabric if done right. Durable, fast drying, and can be completely recycled.

For example, Patagonia tends to have high quality polyesters and has since the 70s. My experience with their fleece is that I can abuse it and it'll come out unaffected on the other end. Pilling now and then that I take down with a pill remover.

Nylon is also a fantastic material, when used appropriately, like for the shell of a jacket.

And don't get me wrong, cotton, wool, and hemp are all fantastic as well. Most of my clothing is those fabrics and they do a damn fine job at what they're good at.

[sva_]

Pro tip: if your clothes say 100% merino wool or whatever, this is only about the fiber, and they may still be covered in plastic from the "superwash" process (for example, almost all merino wool is)

[adrianN]

I once bought 100% hemp pants because I heard that material is tougher than cotton, but my bicycle seat killed the pants in just a few weeks. Modern jeans last a few months to a year. I have yet to find pants that endure a bicycle commute.

[cyberax]

I tried that but quickly found out that a bit of polyester makes clothes MUCH more durable. It doesn't matter for bath robes, but underwear or socks with just 5% of polyester last almost 10x longer.

[gibspaulding]

I’ve been going the same direction lately. We have enough plastic in our environment, the last thing I need is to be wearing it. It’s probably a bit paranoid just from a health perspective, but I’ve found that I genuinely prefer the feel/look of natural fibers.

[cyberax]

> Is anyone else freaked out about cleaning their dryer's lint filter given all the new fabric materials?

I used to be. So I spent quite a lot of time researching the issue. Not just google searches, but actually speaking with biologists.

I think that the current microplastic scare is overblown. The "credit card worth of plastic in brain" articles are just ridiculous. Biologically, the body has defenses against microscopic contaminants in blood. There are special immune cells that "eat" insoluble particles and then get excreted (typically in bile).

It looks like I'm not alone in my bafflement: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/01/scary-research-... or https://www.vox.com/climate/475004/microplastics-research-fa...

[dekhn]

Nearly every environment-adjacent field has concern nannies who make unrealistic risk assessments which then get regurgitated into guilt-inspiring newspaper articles. This is especially common when there is no way to determine for certain what the actual risk is; some folks fall on the "allow zero risk" side.

[sitharus]

I just try to buy natural or the semi-synthetic cellulose fabrics, there's quite a variety.

Natural fabrics are cotton, silk, wool and linen of course, but the semi-synthetic fabrics like the rayons (viscose, modal, "bamboo", Tencel, Lyocell, Bemberg, and some sorts of artificial silk) are wood cellulose chemically rearranged so they're just cellulose when they reach you.

The fabric referred to as Acetate is cellulose acetate, so not pure cellulose like cotton and rayon but is just as biodegradable and contains no petroleum plastics.

Of course the production process for viscose rayons (not Tencel/Lyocell/Modal - those use a different process) isn't great. It uses carbon disulfide which is a neurotoxin. However it's not a persistent pollutant. Modern factories in the west try to capture and recycle as much carbon disulfide as possible (it's released from the rayon during processing and can be fed back in to the process) but as a lot of factories are in countries with poor controls on this it's hard to tell how many are doing this.

[itsgrimetime]

ive recently found some rayon shirts I really like, but how do you wash them without destroying them? everything I've read online says dry cleaning is the only way

[LUmBULtERA]

Yeah, I've started being a bit concerned about inhaling all the tiny plastic fibers every time I clean the filters and wondering what could be doing to my lunges.

[themafia]

Do not dry your cotton shirts in the dryer. It's as easy as that. You hang them up and let them air dry. They'll last forever.

[teruakohatu]

In New Zealand, culturally people generally use dryers only when it is too wet to hang them outside. Dryers are seen as wasteful and destructive. T-shirts last longer but they do not last forever. Quality has gone down substantially.

[Vrondi]

But I have 90s t-shirts that are just now dying after all these years of being dried only in an electric dryer, and other t-shirts just a few years old that are disintegrating. There's definitely been a quality change in the average shirt.

[stickfigure]

Cotton shirts aren't valuable enough to treat this gingerly. I hang dry my merino, but it's easier to just buy new cotton shirts every five years or so. That's a good run for clothing.

[thrawa8387336]

I had the exhaust vent disconnect. Still think of the amount of microplastics I must have inhaled then

[kazinator]

My following comment is not about clothes, but not long ago I washed some curtains that were hanging in a window for some fifteen years. The amount of lint that came out in the dryer was incredible. I'm talking inch-thick wad on the filter screen, growing another inch with continued drying, after being removed.

It was probably due to years of UV breakdown of the fibers from daylight.

[IAmBroom]

Or accumulation of (invisible) hair and clothing fibers by the coarse curtain fabric over the years.

[strbean]

I wonder what impact those plastic bits used to attach tags to clothing have on durability. Woven/knit products kind of have a countdown that starts when threads break, and those tags tend to mean your clothing already has broken threads right from the store.

[Gigachad]

Most tshirts I've seen have a tiny fabric loop on the collar where the tag can be attached without puncturing the fabric.

[nezi]

I hold my breath when I clean the lint trap, replace it and start the drier, then leave the laundry room and take a breath. I’m still probably inhaling some fibers but it makes me feel like I’m doing something.

[dragonwriter]

Probably be easier to just where an N95 (or even a cloth mask, these aren't really small particles) when changing the lint trap, to the extent this is a concern.

[ynac]

That was me - until today. Now I've got a newish Dyson that was annoying to use on floors stashed under the water heater with a sneaky hose extension that flips up to deal with lint without even removing the filter all the way. It has a good filter on it and the container should hold months of lint.

Next question...how do I empty the Dyson container. Ha!

[getlawgdon]

So I'm not the only one.

[dec0dedab0de]

I hadn’t considered that, but I have also paid to get my laundry done for the last 15+ years, it is the greatest luxury.

[SapporoChris]

Hang dry clothing to avoid the drying machine issues all together and it is much gentler on the clothing.

[mc32]

Velva sheen makes some decent sweats and hoodies.