The surge of toxic plastics in our ocean environment means it’s time to ban them from our wardrobe.
It’s time to stop wearing fleece and polyester garments which shed huge amounts of microplastics into our environment every time they go through a washing machine.
This video interviews one of Plymouth University’s Professors of Marine Biology, Richard Thompson (OBE) who states that between 2000 and 2016 use of polyester in the garment industry increased from 8.3 to 21.3m tonnes. “There has been a significant increase in the quantities of plastic in the environment, a lot of that is syntheitc fibres. If we look at a domestic washing load – this could release up to 700,000 fibres in one wash – a good number of which will escape into the environment. And this is accumulating year on year. A third of the fish in the English Channel have synthetic pieces in their gut,” he says, “in 10, 20, 30 years’ time the quantity of those pieces is only going to be greater. But the shedding of fibres and recyclability was never part of the design brief.”
This video from the Economist shows how a few people are trying to reduce microplastics in the ocean. Clearly a good traditional woollen jersey is going to better than synthetic fleece; wool thermals better than cotton or man made mixes. Wool tends to be warmer as well.