Hand washing some of your clothes can reduce microplastics in the environment: study
CTV
A new study published by the American Chemical Society (ACS) found that handwashing clothing made with plastic-fibres such as polyester and nylon releases less microplastics into the environment as opposed to using a washing machine.
An overwhelming 9.5 billion tonnes of plastic was produced by the world in 2019, according to the Global Change Data Lab, a U.K. non-profit.
While some efforts to reduce plastic waste are being made, such as through elimination of plastic bags at grocery stores, or the riddance of plastic straws by Starbucks, one unexpected contributor to the overwhelming amount of microplastics in the environment could be the way clothes are washed.
A new study published in the American Chemical Society (ACS) journal ES&T Water found that handwashing clothing made with plastic-fibres such as polyester and nylon releases less microplastics into the environment as opposed to using a washing machine.
Past research has confirmed the high amounts of microplastics released though laundry machine washing. That’s why a of team of researchers based in the U.S. and China sought to further explore the results of handwashing, according to the ACS study.
Microplastics are the tiny plastic particles, smaller than five millimetres, according to the National Ocean Service, that result from both commercial products, such as cosmetics and clothes, and the breakdown of larger plastics.
The problem with microplastics, is that like all sizes of plastic waste, the fibres do not easily break down into harmless molecules, and will take hundreds or thousands of years to fully decompose.
Until then, it’s estimated there are 24.4 trillion pieces of microplastics that litter our oceans and are extremely harmful to the environment.
