MICROFIBERS
The Real Costs by Jim Gilliand
S
ynthetic fabrics make our lives so much more comfortable. If you shudder thinking about downward-facing dogging it without yoga pants, I totally understand. And if you shudder when you think about working out in a sweatshirt that doesn’t wick away all your hard-earned sweat, I get that, too. But that comfort and convenience come with a price, one that is far too high to pay. We need to understand what makes those yoga pants so stretchy and those sweatshirts so drying is microfiber, a synthetic thread that is finer than a strand of silk, which, in turn, is finer than a human hair. Microfiber is made from either polyesters or polyamides like Kevlar (which is used in bulletproof vests), or a mixture of the two with polypropylene. Microfiber’s various characteristics — softness and toughness, absorption and water repellency — and its electrostatic and filtering capabilities make it suitable for a variety of purposes. Microfiber is used to make mats, knits, and weaves, which are then made into 18 | Good Fat Life
various items of clothing, upholstery for furniture and car interiors, household goods like tablecloths, industrial filters, and cleaning products. Microfiber has weaved its way into our lives — quite literally: we are drinking and ingesting it. The Microfiber Pollution & The Apparel Industry project found that “microfibers are prevalent in both aquatic and terrestrial habitats, from the bottom of the Indian Ocean to farmland in the United States.” The project also found that “when synthetic jackets are washed, on average, 1,174 milligrams of microfibers are released from the washing machine. These microfibers then travel to local wastewater treatment plants, where up to 40 percent of them can enter into rivers, lakes, and oceans (depending on local wastewater treatment conditions).” A 2016 article in The Guardian said “Studies indicate that the microfiber in our clothes could be poisoning our waterways and food chain on a massive scale. Microfiber — tiny threads
shed from fabric — have been found in abundance on shorelines where wastewater is released.” A recent study in that article found that microfiber makes up 85 percent of human-made debris on shorelines worldwide. I predict that microfiber will go the way of microbeads, those little bits of plastic that were used in face scrubs and shampoos that were found to be so hazardous that Congress outlawed them in 2015. If you think you can’t do without your microfiber stuff, remember that we are doing just fine without those microbeads, which were once hailed as essential to personal hygiene. Until that time, though, we’ve read
