The Pros And Cons Of Microfiber

“Breaking a plastic bottle into millions of fibrous bits … might prove to be worse than doing nothing at all,” warns Leah Messinger, a reporter for the national British newspaper entitled The Guardian, in her article “How Your Clothes Are Poisoning Our Oceans and Food Supply.” However, she is not referring to any old, wrinkled piece of clothing off our closet floors. The microfiber lined, thin, durable, and immensely warn synthetic and acrylic clothing used for outdoor sports and yoga pants are the garments recently making headlines. As numerous water samplings from shorelines across the globe allude, microfibers, thin fibers shed from clothing like Patagonia, are detrimental to our aquatic ecosystems (Messinger). To combat microfibers’ negative

Popular scientific theory suggests many (forty percent) of the microfibers accumulating in waters today are derived from machine washing (Messinger). In fact, a leading manufacturer of microfiber clothing’s own research (Patagonia), in response to a 2011 study finding microfibers dominate shoreline microplastic of first world countries, uncovered, “that a single synthetic fleece jacket released as much as 250,000 microfibers, or 2.7 grams … when washed in a machine” (Cernansky). Acrylic fibers were even worse with losing close to 700,000 fibers a wash (Cernansky). Many scientists are unsurprised by the results due to our current plastic world, but as an article in the Environmental Technology and Science Journal suggests, an increasing human population will likely lead to more synthetic consumption (Browne et. al). Without a decrease in the rate of microfibers lost per load of laundry, unnerving trends will continue to cast a dark shadow in lakes, rivers, and

Alongside dominating ocean shorelines by highly populated areas of the world, microfibers make up seventy-one percent of debris collecting in the Great Lakes and are the second highest debris found in Lake Michigan (Messinger). Microfibers have also turned up around Antarctica (Cernansky). Two years ago, marine researchers studying plankton in the Southern Ocean (surrounds Antarctica) found concentrations of plastic (microfibers included) around 50,000 fragments per square kilometer versus the expected 5,000 fragments per square kilometer (Stromberg). A research team of five graduate students also tried to estimate how many pounds of microfibers the U.S. could potentially release into our water systems. Four different synthetic jackets were washed in both a top-load and front-load washer, and the runoff water was collected. The study concluded with 100,000 people being able to send between 19 and 242 pounds of microfibers daily (Varinsky). If compared to the entire United States’ population, Americans could be releasing over 750,000 pounds of microfibers every day.