23 Saint Johners trapped laundry lint for a year to keep microplastics out of waterways

Taylor Kormann didn't know what to expect when she signed up to collect the goopy leftovers of her laundry cycles for a year as a part of a citizen science project for the Atlantic Coastal Action Program.

"It was almost shocking to see what's coming out of the laundry," Kormann said.

Kormann and 22 other Saint John residents spent 2022 collecting the wet lint from their washing machines to measure the microplastics their wash cycles were contributing to the city's water system.

Participants were given a simple filter that attached to the machine's drain hose. All together they did more than 2,500 loads of laundry, cleaning the filter every 10 to 15 loads.

The lint was dried, weighed and collected and by year's end the total could roughly fill a small garbage bag.

Kormann said cleaning the filter was easy and only took a few minutes but said it could be a bit unpleasant if left to sit. "It's kind of a bit of a smelly undertaking, as you can imagine," Kormann said. "Water is going through and then you've got this kind of — gunk — sitting on [the filter] for a while.

"You think your laundry is clean … but to see what's left over and what goes down the drain was really surprising." In its report on the project, ACAP described microplastics as "very small pieces of plastic (less than 5 mm) that enter our rivers and oceans, and pose threats to a multitude of aquatic life."

Sources include synthetic fibres from clothing, as well as microfibres from hygiene products and litter.  The report says ACAP has found microplastics present in surface water, and Saint John Harbour, "with microfibres being the most abundant."

Roxanne MacKinnon, executive director of ACAP, said the citizen science project yielded a total of three pounds of dried laundry residue that contained an estimated 74 million microfibres. 

MacKinnon said that number is about enough to fill a water glass. She said they arrived at this number by using a calculation method created by researchers who conducted a similar study in Parry Sound, Ont., in 2021. This allowed ACAP to estimate the average amount of microplastic based on milligrams of lint samples they received from their participants. "We really wanted to try to get down to a number, both for science … but also just from a community education standpoint," said MacKinnon, "to help people understand the small action that they took at home, how big of an impact that actually had overall."  Kormann agrees. "If it's a small thing that I can do to help advance research, advance understanding, then it's something I'm happy to do."

Laundry microfibres are a form of water pollution, MacKinnon said, whether they're plastic or a natural fibre.

"The amount of fibres we're starting to see in our waterways is concerning as our population grows. As we continue to use more non-natural fibres, we're starting to see more of these in our waterways when we are sampling from microplastics."

In a 2018 study, ACAP Saint John found microplastics in all of the city's waterways. MacKinnon said that the potential harm these have to humans is not currently well understood as the field of research is still developing

"We're seeing more and more research go into trying to figure out what the long term impacts are, because we're kind of in the middle of it," she said.