How Our Clothes are Getting into our Food

When someone says the word “plastic pollution,” a million different images come into our minds. 

Plastic bags floating in the ocean. Six-pack encasements wrapped around a turtle’s neck. Beaches riddled with garbage or birds’ stomachs filled with plastic straws and wrappers. Plastic water bottles filling landfills and giant garbage patches buoyant in the ocean. 

But what’s hard to picture is the microscopic particles of synthetic fibers that are washed from our laundry. They leave our homes unfiltered and flow through our water treatment processes and into our ecosystem. These microscopic pieces of plastic end up in our drinking water and food. They are found in the most remote landscapes and are even 7 miles underneath the surface of the ocean. 

So how do these plastics end up in our food? And even before that, how do plastics end up in our clothes? 

Fabrics like polyester, nylon, acrylic and polyamide are all made of synthetic (which means “chemically-based” or “man-made”) materials. Plastics are either manufactured specifically for these fabrics or are recycled and reused to manufacture them. During the wash, rinse, and spin cycles of household and industrial laundering, millions upon millions of the pieces of synthetic material are flushed out with the water, soap, and dirt. They don’t break down. They don’t biodegrade. They simply pollute every space they inhabit.

Many of the fabrics and materials manufactured of these synthetic compounds are attributed with the “fast fashion” industry, where clothing is made cheap and fast so that it can be distributed easily As our awareness of plastic pollution and its impact on our world becomes more and more at the center of our discussions, we discover new implications to things we once considered to be conveniences. 

Filtrol Provides an Answer

At Filtrol, we aren’t necessarily cutting away the plastic that’s wrapped around the turtle’s neck…though we would if we could. But what we are doing? We’re stopping the fibers that are shedding from your clothes from ever leaving your home or facility. We’re cleaning out the wastewater that’s being pumped into water treatment plants, so that billions of plastic particles don’t devastate our ecosystem.