Jun. 12th, 2025
Hey team, and welcome back to one5c! As a Pilates enthusiast and full-time work-from-homer, I have a very powerful bond with my leggings and yoga pants. It takes a lot for me to swap out my squishiest, stretchiest pants for jeans, and there are a few pairs in my drawer that have been with me for almost a decade. As much as I love them, I know that they’re often made of polyester or nylon—aka plastic. That means that, unlike cotton or wool fabrics, they never really break down in nature and every time I throw a pair in the washing machine, they shed tiny pieces of plastic that eventually end up in our waterways.
Luckily, our contributor Maddy Lauria has the scoop on what we can do to lower the impact of our stretchy wardrobe essentials—because I’m certainly not giving them up any time soon. —Sara Kiley
FEATURE HEADLINE
By some really smart folks
Many of our clothes are plastic. As of 2021, synthetic fibers made up nearly 70% of all materials used in textiles. The more fast fashion—that is, clothing made cheaply to follow ever-quickening trend cycles—catches on, the worse the problem becomes. A 2022 review study noted that synthetics have outpaced cotton as the top textile on the market since 1995.
While most garments today aren’t made to last forever, some of the synthetic fibers like polyester will persist for much longer than we’d like to admit (we’re talking decades or even centuries). “If you pull a sample out of the water, or look at fish tissues or sediments, microfibers are usually the top thing you find,” says Susanne Brander, an ecotoxicologist and associate professor at Oregon State University. Textiles are one of the biggest sources of those contaminants: It’s estimated that domestic washing alone leads to 500,000 metric tons of microfibers seeping into waterways around the world every year.
Clothing of any type of material, even cotton, can shed microfibers when being worn, washed, and dried. These fibers can also include a variety of chemical additives that can ultimately end up contaminating air, land, and water around the world. And every additional polyester shirt or trendy dress also perpetuates the environmental impacts related to an overreliance on petroleum products—often without companies taking responsibility for their products’ carbon footprint.
How are microplastics linked to clothing?
All the synthetic materials used to make sportswear, loungewear, pantyhose, dresses, shirts, and everything in between are made from different combinations of polymers (aka plastics). Polyester, nylon, and rayon are among the most common plastic-derived textiles. When these materials get washed, torn, or chucked, they degrade and release microfibers, which are a form of microplastics.
Polyester is one of the worst offenders. This particular synthetic made up 52% of all global fiber production in 2020, according to an interagency report on microfiber pollution. A single run through the washing machine could emit around 18 million microfibers, one 2020 study found.
Wastewater treatment plants do a decent job of removing microplastics from streams. Many researchers estimate that these plants, which can serve small communities or whole regions, can separate more than 90% of microplastics from the incoming sewer streams. However, nanoplastics can sometimes still pass through.
So what can be done with all the microplastic-riddled waste that treatment plants leave behind? That’s the bigger question. Since that waste, typically known in the industry as “sludge,” is sometimes repurposed as fertilizer, the microplastics that end up being flushed down sinks and toilets may ultimately end up on farm fields. Scientists are studying how this runoff might allow microplastic fibers to reach waterways.
And that’s all before you consider the tens of thousands of chemicals that could be coating those strands. Dyes, perfumes, and other ingredients that help fight stains, mold, sweat, blood, and tears are being studied for their own potentially toxic effects as potential carcinogens and endocrine disruptors. And, of course, these chemicals can also coat natural fibers like cotton, wool, and hemp that are used to make clothing and other textiles like upholstery.
So what can you do to minimize the environmental cost? Boost your knowledge. Here’s what anyone who wears clothes should know about the relationship between plastics and our wardrobes.
Tip 1: Buy less—and choose natural fabrics when possible
The best way to address microplastics in clothing is to avoid buying more clothes—or at least skip synthetic fibers, no matter how good the end-of-season sale might be. The rise of fast fashion has led to upwards of 50 billion garments being disposed of every year, according to a special report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). For synthetics alone, production has increased exponentially from about 25 million metric tons in 2000 to 65 million metric tons in 2018, that same report found.
Ultimately, Brander says responsibly sourced and produced organic cotton and wool products are the top-tier choices for making sure fewer harmful fibers make their way out into the world. For the yoga pants lovers, there’s even a few brands out there that make workout gear minus the polyester. Check the label before purchasing—it’ll say what the contents of the clothing are—and check to see if it’s Global Organic Textile Standard certified.
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THE ROUNDUP
IN THE NEWS THIS WEEK
Solar panels may be good for more than just clean energy—especially in grasslands. A study in Environmental Research Letters found that the presence of solar panels can reduce water stress, improve soil moisture levels, and increase plant growth by about 20% compared with open fields during especially dry years.
The Trump administration just released a plan to eliminate requirements for power plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while also easing limits on pollutants like mercury, reports Bloomberg. This is especially alarming considering that if the U.S. power sector were a country on its own, it’d have a bigger carbon footprint than Japan, Brazil, the U.K. and Canada.
Climate.gov may be the next government website in the crosshairs, reports The Guardian. The entire content production staff of the website, which is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office, was let go at the end of May. “It does seem to be part of this sort of slow and quiet way of trying to keep science agencies from providing information to the American public about climate,” said Rebecca Lindsey, the website’s former program manager.
A recent study in Nature Communications highlights some of the best places around the world for reforestation, taking into account the balance of social conflict, wildlife protections, and carbon sequestration potential. The authors zoomed in on 195 million hectares of land from Colombia to Canada to Europe that together could remove more than 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere a year.
Ocean acidification crossed a critical threshold five years ago, according to a study published in Global Change Biology. This happens when oceans absorb too much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which lowers the pH of the water. That drop can prove especially harmful to organisms like shellfish and corals, whose hard features require calcium, and threatens the entire ocean ecosystem.
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