Wearing plastic = eating plastic

We thought we were doing something good wearing polarfleece - recycling all those plastic bottles.
Now we discover we're feeding sardines microplastic. Aghghgh

I've written about this a little in a previous post, when I inadvertently bought some plastic clothes for my kids (which was what prompted me to start this blog), but it's such an important story, it deserves a post of its own.

A team of scientists in Dublin studied sand, taking samples from 18 beaches on 6 continents. All samples were full of plastic. When they analysed the plastic, it was found to be mostly polyester, acrylic and nylon - the main plastics our clothes are made from. How did it get there? Yep, the humble washing machine, washing our not-so-humble plastic clothes.

Every time you wash your clothes, nearly 2000 bits of lint and fibre (in the case of polar fleece) can go down the drain with the rinse water, ending up in our oceans and getting confused as food by smaller animals. It then binds with toxins and heavy metals in the ocean which then bioaccumulate in the food chain - potentially ending up on our tables.

It's a wake up call, really. I have some fleece clothes that are so cosy for winter. But I'm starting a "rag bag" to take them to the op shop. As mentioned here before, we have a greywater system, and if for that reason only, we don't want this microplastic in our soil. I'll be looking for natural fibres for me and my family to wear in future - cotton, hemp, wool, linen, rayon? silk (or is that too cruel?) anyway, the quest continues. There are some wonderful superfine merino wool clothes coming out these days. They're not cheap, but then a good polar fleece isn't cheap either.

Another, related, aspect of wearing fleece, is that you're wearing a product - polyethylene terephthalate - that was never really designed to be worn. Often it's made from recycled PET bottles, which can seldom ever become new, food-grade bottles. There are hygiene regulations, and the strands become too short under heat, so they're turned into jackets.

In their groundbreaking 2002 book, Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart, point out:

Blindly adopting superficial environmental approaches without fully understanding their effects can be no better – and perhaps even worse – than doing nothing.

People may feel they are making an ecologically sound choice by buying and wearing clothing made of fibers from recycled plastic bottles. But the fibers from plastic bottles contain toxins such as antimony, catalytic residues, ultraviolet stabilizers, plasticizers and antioxidants, which were never designed to lie next to human skin.

They were writing before the ocean plastic pollution problem had really been highlighted, but yet another reason to refuse/boycott polar fleece.

I first heard this story on ABC Radio National a few months ago. And there's some more information over at Grist, where I read about it a few months ago too.