The athletic apparel industry has been growing over these years as we are promoting healthier lifestyles (Yan et al., 2020). However, this growing change in many people’s lifestyles has created a fast fashion industry in athletic wear and has generated more microfibres than ever. In today’s blog, I will share more about the causes and detrimental effects of microfibres from the athletic wear industry.
As mentioned from our previous entry, microfibres are usually generated when we are washing our clothes (Singh et al., 2020). Washing machines are not able to filter out all these micro fibres and this becomes a great concern as these wastewaters are being sent to public waterways or to septic tanks (Miller et al., 2017). More often than not, these wastewaters are being diverted into water bodies without the right treatments to remove it (Hartline et al., 2016). Without intense filtering, all these microfibres will settle and end up in the sludge which is usually being repurposed as fertilisers and will return to the water bodies as runoffs (Miller et al., 2017).
Drawing links back to the athletic apparel industry, most of the athletic apparel is made of polyester or cotton and they produce plastic or non-plastic microfibers after washing. These plastic or non-plastic microfibres become toxins in the environment after some time as these microfibres start to break down. Most of us might think that the non-plastic microfibres will not release toxins as we think they are biodegradable. However, these non-plastic microfibres have been treated with chemicals such as resin which prolonged the degradation and will release carcinogenic toxins into the water bodies after they degrade (Miller et al., 2017). As such, the athletic apparel industry contributes many types of microfibres and all are equally pollutive.
Not only do the toxins cause problems with regards to the quality of the water, but the microfibre itself can also become a threat to the ecosystem. Animals will treat the microfibres as food and ingest them. An example is a type of shore crab (Carcinus maenas), the ingestion of microfibres lowered the food intake that the crab eats over a month. Ultimately, in the long run, this will result in starvation (Miller et al., 2017). Not only will crabs treat these as food, but fishes will also do the same and start to ingest these microfibres.
Although this blog post is only covering the effects of microfibres, we see other cases of fishes ingesting microplastics as seen in Figure 1. Although microplastics are dangerous and can be found in the guts of fishes, we need to be more conscious of microfibres. It is way smaller than microplastic which can easily be ingested by fishes and microfibres is also the common microplastic in oceans (Miller et al., 2017). It is also a troubling issue as these microfibres can start to cause massive problems in fish’s respiratory system as their gills have to work harder or adapt to the presence of microfibre in the water. Such respiratory problems will affect the fish’s ability to survive. Furthermore, these fishes might also enter our food chain. At some point, we might all be eating plastic-filled fish due to the nature of these microfibers and microplastics being classified as persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic (PBTs).
Now is the time to ponder if human activities and environmental health are in an inverse relationship. All these athletic wear we are consuming contributes greatly to the release of microfibres into our environment and drastically disrupts the ecosystem. Additionally, the knock-on effects that these microfibres will create have to be seriously considered, as it will directly affect humans through our health and food chain.
References
Duke University. (2020, March 16). Microplastic fibers linked to respiratory, reproductive changes in fish: Exposure to microplastics causes cellular changes in fish and may disrupt endocrine systems. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 14, 2020 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200316173516.htm
Hartline, N. L., Bruce, N. J., Karba, S. N., Ruff, E. O., Sonar, S. U., & Holden, P. A. (2016). Microfiber Masses Recovered from Conventional Machine Washing of New or Aged Garments. Environmental Science & Technology, 50(21), 11532-11538. doi:10.1021/acs.est.6b03045
Miller, R. Z., Watts, A. J. R., Winslow, B. O., Galloway, T. S. & Barrows, A. P. W. 2017. Mountains to the sea: River study of plastic and non-plastic microfiber pollution in the northeast USA. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 124, 245-251.
Singh, R. P., Mishra, S., & Das, A. P. (2020). Synthetic microfibers: Pollution toxicity and remediation. Chemosphere, 257, 127199. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2020.127199
Thompson, A. (2018). From Fish to Humans, A Microplastic Invasion May Be Taking a Toll. Retrieved 15 September 2020, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-fish-to-humans-a-microplastic-invasion-may-be-taking-a-toll/
Yan, S., Henninger Claudia, E., Jones, C. & Mccormick, H. 2020. Sustainable knowledge from consumer perspective addressing microfibre pollution. Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal, 24, 437-454.
