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Polyester fibres make up nearly three-quarters of all microplastic pollution found in the Arctic. These widespread synthetic fibres are most likely coming from textiles manufacturing and household laundry.
We already knew that microplastics are present in the Arctic, but new research shines light on the source of these microplastics. Peter Ross at the University of British Columbia in Canada and his colleagues examined seawater samples from 71 locations across the Arctic taken from 3 to 8 metres below the surface.
Microplastics were present in all samples except one, with a count of approximately 40 microplastic particles per cubic metre of seawater. They found that synthetic fibres made up 92 per cent of the microplastic pollution in these samples, and 73 per cent of this is polyester.
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Microplastics are very small pieces of plastic which are less than 5 millimetres in size. They are either deliberately manufactured to be small, such as microbeads in personal care products, or they have formed from the weathering of larger plastics, such as polyester microfibres. The polyester microfibres can often be as small as one-hundredth of a millimetre.
“There is strong suspicion that laundry, clothing and textiles are playing a significant role in contaminating the world’s oceans with microfibres,” says Ross.
They found that there are more microplastics in the eastern Arctic versus the western Arctic. “In the eastern Arctic, we found three times more microplastics, which supports the notion that we have more microplastics coming in from the Atlantic side, rather than the Pacific side,” says team member, Anna Posacka, also at Ocean Wise.
“There is strong suspicion that laundry, clothing and textiles are playing a significant role in contaminating the world’s oceans with microfibres,” says Ross. “It has the potential to catastrophically impact at different levels of the food chain.”
“Every time we put the washing machine on, we are releasing thousands of pieces of plastic,” says Christian Dunn at Bangor University in the UK, who was not involved in the research. Simple actions like using laundry filters and microfibre catchers can remove up to 95 per cent of the fibres lost from washing machines and tumble dryers.
Journal reference: Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-20347-1
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