“Throw a polyester sweater in the washing machine and it’ll come out nice and clean, but also not quite its whole self. As it rinses, millions of synthetic fibers will shake loose and wash out with the waste water, which then flows to a treatment plant. Each year, a single facility might pump 21 billion of these microfibers out to sea, where they swirl in currents, settle in sediments, and end up as fish food, with untold ecological consequences” (Simon 2021).
Our relationship with clothing has gone awry. Why would we clothe ourselves in plastics when we could have cotton, wool, hemp, linen, or other natural fibers? According to Rebecca Burgess and Courtney White, two fashion activists, polyester is found in 60% of today’s clothing, alongside other synthetics like rayon and nylon (Burgess & White 2019). Our clothes are even dyed with oil-based materials such as azo dyes which are known to be carcinogenic. Wastewater runoff from dye factories pollutes watersheds. There is a slew of problems linked to textile manufacturing, only one of which is the amount of microplastics that end up in the ocean after washing machine cycles.
“Now, what to do about this omnipresent pollutant? It’s not likely that humanity will instantly phase out clothing made of synthetic material. But we as consumers can demand that brands abandon fast fashion—cheaply made synthetic clothing that easily shreds into microfibers. Governments can also legislate that washing machine manufacturers add fiber-trapping filters to their products” (Simon 2021). Burgess suggests moving away from synthetic clothes to those that adhere to the soil-to-soil model, a.k.a, all natural materias that can be composted after use. Even clothes that are branded as green because they are made from recycled synthetics pose a problem. In a For the Wild conversation between Ayana Young and Rebecca Burgess, Young brings up this issue: “I’d like to get back to the greenwashing of fashion, and over the past couple of decades the ecological impacts of industrialization and globalization have become glaringly clear. Certainly in the past decade the fashion industry has been confronted by its own impacts, yet we’ve not seen any scaling down, only new implementations of so-called ‘techno-fixes’ and ‘green solutions’ in order to maintain profit. And I’m thinking about the burgeoning sector of so-called ‘green fashion’ through the refashioning of our plastic waste into wearable fabrics. And while there’s certainly some form of ingenuity and trying to address our waste problem, these quick fixes also perpetuate the ubiquity of plastic” (Young 2020). Burgess responds by saying that there is no need for new materials within the textile industry, and in fact, natural materials such as wool and cotton are going underused because of the proliferation of synthetics.
Burgess says that one step is halving our consumption and doubling our use time of clothing. If you’re buying synthetics (it’s hard not to, especially for certain items like jackets or shoes), go for quality over quantity. Another step: wash your clothes less. Ultimately, the goal is to move away from synthetics and back to locally produced natural materials, a change that necessitates massive infrastructure changes, but that also starts with consumer demand.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 