Simon just pinged me with a PM. I guess to represent the Chemical Engineering / Environmental Engineering contingent of BPL.
The studies findings make sense. Synthetic fibers are very long lasting. They kind of have to be. They have to tolerate mechanic stress as a garment, UV light when worn, high air temperatures in a closed car and in the clothes dryer, high water temperatures and caustic detergents in the clothes washer. I’ve got Patagonia shells and Baggie Shorts from 1984 that still work fine (give or take the elastic bits).
And POTWs (Publicly-Owned wastewater Treatment Works), your citys’ sewer treatment plants aren’t designed to remove these fibers. They are designed to remove big chunks (with big screens), floating stuff (with weirs), sinking stuff (with settling tanks), degrade fertilizers and nutrients (by adding “food”), degrade organics (by adding atmospheric air and/or hyperbaric oxygen), and sometimes to kill infectious organisms (with chlorine or ozone).
But these fibers are very close to water’s density and their very large surface area compared to their weight mean they don’t float or sink in time to be settled out. Obviously, something like the lint trap in your dryer could catch many of them at the POTW, but, man!, that would be a slow process (meaning a lot of area/volume would be needed) and the screens would have to continually be cleaned.
What can you do? Well, if you’re on a septic system like I am, none of your wastewater flows directly in pipes to the ocean (even though I live on the Ocean). Rather, it flows through 100 of feet or typically a few miles of soils before it gets to surface water, so you’ve buried those fibers in the ground. But if your wastewater goes to a POTW and hence to a river or ocean outfall, then your fleece sweater is probably contributing to the problem. My simplest suggestion is to switch to a front-loading washing machine. When I did, my clothes produced a lot less lint in the dryer, so I’m sure they lost less lint in the discharged water, too. The most striking thing is when I take a cloth dinner napkin out of the washer and it is still folded like how I put it in. It’s clean now, but still folded! It is that much more gentle a process. So my clothes last longer, front loaders use less water, therefore less hot water (= energy), and less detergent. And you can wash down garments and quilts at home instead of schlepping them to the laundromat to use their front loaders.
One quote from the article seemed off base, “I don’t want to have eaten fish for 50 years and then say, ‘Oh, whoops’,” Treinish said. Good grief! The risk of these fibers holding many more PCBs, than, say, the fish’s own tissues seems far fetched to me. The well-known range of toxics in fish IS real – mercury in large tuna and swordfish, PSP seasonally in shellfish, higher levels of toxins in farmed fish, as are the health benefits of consuming younger fish from cleaner waters (like the 3/4-year old sockeye salmon I catch in my town).
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