Your clothes are polluting the ocean every time you do laundry

Oceanic pollution has become as serious concern in the modern era as use of plastics coupled with the practice of dumping waste into the oceans has created some environmentally unhealthy areas. Identifying where the pollution is coming from, how it eventually degrades and its overall effects on oceanic ecosystems has become a very large subject of academic research. In particular, the new use of micro-particles for cleaning products and the findings that some large pieces of plastic will fragment into tiny particles has prompted further work into understanding how these "microplastics" could impact animals and environments living in the ocean and coastal regions.

This recent article published by "Treehugger.com" highlights the results of this study published in the journal, Environmental Science and Technology. The news article makes emphasis of the finding that a large portion of the microplastics found in coastal populated areas, and especially near waste disposal sites, could come from synthetic clothing fibers that may be entering waste water after being cleaned in washing machines. There is special emphasis put on the statistic that >1900 fibers could come from one single piece of clothing. The article is then ended with a call to action to bring this study to the attention of clothing makers and encouraging readers to only wear natural fibers to avoid this pollution.

The research article paints a slightly different story, though it does seem to indicate that the washing of synthetic fiber clothing could play a significant role in the total number of microplastics in the waters. They concluded this based on the relative percentages of types of fibers in the water and compared these to general percentages used in synthetic clothing fiber, however they note several times that this is most likely only one of many sources of the fibers. After concluding many of these fibers are most likely from clothing, the authors then used a washing machine to determine how many fibers generally come out in the waste water by washing synthetic textiles. The article does state that a single piece of clothing can emit >1900 fibers, but the mean across all samples was closer to 200 fibers, this seems to be a way to try and make their findings more exciting but could come across and disingenuous to readers. In addition, the study does not control for use of detergents nor types of other machines that could have other filtering mechanisms in place. What I drew from the study was the composition of microfibers in waste waters is similar to synthetic fibers used in clothing and that a preliminary test of washing machine usage indicates these fibers do come out waste water, but the effect of this is still largely uncertain.

The only data figure from the ES&T paper, demonstrating the sampled waste sites along with the results of their machine washing tests.

Somewhat more interestingly, the article cites a quote from the first author of the paper taken from this website, indicating that the author is attempting to use this type of study to sell new textile fabrics that reduce waste pollution to large manufacturers. While this is usually benign behavior, I would have liked to see some disclaimer in the scientific study that declares some competing financial interest. Especially because the article was very short, had very little in the way of presented data and seemed to use hyperbolic terms so news agencies could easily make a story.

I thought the treehugger article showed pretty clear bias and cherry picked lines from the study to make a stronger point than what the researchers concluded. On top of that, I felt the actual scientific study lacked in content and detail; it appears to me that the authors were trying to get their story out and make it seem very important without giving background, context or strong evidence for their point. Overall I would give both of these sources a poor grade for the science and reporting by clouding the data with some influence, both clear and hidden, on what they are attempting to accomplish by publishing these articles.