Earlier this month, researchers reported a startling discovery: in 11 national parks and protected areas in the western US, 1,000 metric tons of microfibers and microplastic particles fall from the sky each year, equivalent to over 120 million plastic water bottles—and that’s in just 6 percent of the country’s land area. Last month, another group described how the ocean is burping up microplastics, which then blow onshore via sea breezes. And last year, still more scientists reported that 7 trillion microplastic particles flow into the San Francisco Bay annually.

Scientists have known about microplastic pollution (technically, bits less than 5 millimeters long) for decades, but the almost unbelievable pervasiveness of the stuff in the environment has really become clear in the last few years. Its ubiquity has coincided with the rise of fast fashion—cheap synthetic clothes that during each wash shed perhaps 100,000 microfibers, which then flow out to rivers and oceans through wastewater. (Consider that 70 years ago, the textile and clothing industries used 2 million tons of synthetic materials; that figure had skyrocketed to almost 50 million tons by 2010.) Everywhere scientists look, these microfibers turn up; they’re blowing into the Arctic and to the tops of (formerly) pristine mountaintops. In that study of US protected areas, 70 percent of the synthetic particles researchers trapped in their samples were microfibers.

There’s simply no putting the plastic back in the bottle; once it’s out in the environment, it just breaks into smaller and smaller bits, infiltrating ever more nooks and crannies. But a growing number of environmentalists and scientists want to hold those responsible for microfiber pollution—largely the fashion industry and makers of washing machines—to account, and to stem the flow of tiny plastics into Earth’s systems.

“Nearly 13,000 tons of microfibers may be entering the marine environment just from Europe's countries alone,” says Nicholas Mallos, senior director of the Ocean Conservancy’s Trash Free Seas program. “Scaled globally, other estimates say maybe 250,000 tons of plastics via microfibers are entering our waterways and oceans. So those are not insignificant numbers, even though we're talking about a very, very small vector of pollution.”

Let’s start with how these plastics make the jump from your home to the outdoor environment. When you wash your synthetic clothing, tens of thousands of microfibers go out with the wastewater in each load. That water flows to a wastewater treatment facility, which might remove anywhere between 83 and 99.9 percent of the fibers, depending on how advanced the facility is, before pumping the rest out to sea. Even given this filtration, a city the size of Toronto could still be emitting hundreds of billions of microfibers each year, according to one study from 2018 by researchers at the University of Toronto.

So, if we just retrofit our wastewater treatment plants to filter out more microfibers, could we be done with it? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. “Even the most advanced plants out there still have fibers in their effluent,” says Mallos, who coauthored the Toronto paper. “So this would be a very expensive fix to make.” And in the era of Covid-19, with government revenues cratering, it will be hard for environmentalists to make the case for spending what little money is left on microfiber mitigation.

Also a problem: The byproduct of wastewater treatment is sludge, a solid organic material that also contains the filtered-out microfibers. This sludge is used to fertilize fields. Once it eventually dries out, the microfibers could take flight on the wind. “We're simply kind of reallocating where those fibers may go and perhaps re-enter the environment,” says Mallos. “The most effective way to get them out of the environment is to prevent them upstream, stopping them from entering our waterway systems in the first place.”

Source: Wired

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