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By Erin Fee, Staff Writer and Researcher for Save The Water™ | November 7, 2019
Laundry duty may be a chore, but at least it’s easier than ever. Thanks to washing machines, the time and labor spent on laundry has been reduced to a few button presses and a couple of hours. But there’s a catch. The water that leaves our washing machines is loaded with microplastics, and it’s polluting our oceans and drinking water.
As their name suggests, microplastics are tiny pieces of plastic. They are less than 5 millimeters long, to be exact. Washing machines are a major source of microfibers, a type of microplastic that comes from human-made materials such as polyester, acrylic, and nylon. The lint that collects in your drying machine contains microfibers. However, the majority goes uncaught by standard filters.
With every load of laundry, countless microfibers come loose from our clothes and are released as wastewater. From there, they will likely be dumped into the ocean or other bodies of water. In fact, the majority of the ocean’s plastic pollution is made up of microfibers and other microplastics.
Microplastics are just as, if not more, harmful than bigger plastic objects. Their small size makes them easy to accidentally ingest, and researchers have found over 100 microfibers in fish.
Consider this: According to a 2016 estimate in Environmental Science and Technology, a population of 100,000 people would produce 793 pounds of microplastic pollution in a year (study link). Since plastics take hundreds of years to degrade, the amount of microplastics will continue to build up over generations if a solution isn’t found.
Many people are taking the initiative to reduce their personal plastic use. However, even environmentally-minded people are often unaware of microplastics. By informing yourself, you have already taken the first step. Though research is still ongoing, studies have produced several suggestions to curb the flow of microfibers from your washing machine: