Last month, Democratic New York City Council Member James Gennaro introduced a bill that would change the way countless New Yorkers do their laundry — by banning laundry detergent pods.
More specifically, the bill—dubbed “Pods Are Plastic”—proposed a ban on dishwashing and laundry detergent pods coated in polyvinyl alcohol, or PVA, a type of plastic that disintegrates when submerged in water. Laundry and soap companies have long argued that the PVA coating is totally safe and 100% biodegradable, but proponents of the bill say that neither of those claims is true.
“Products and profit should not come at the expense of the environment,” Sarah Paiji Yoo, co-founder of a plastic-free cleaning product company called Blueland, said in a statement. Blueland, which manufactures PVA-free laundry and dishwasher tablets, helped write the bill and has been a vocal critic of PVA for years. In 2022, the company helped pen a petition asking the EPA to remove PVA from a list of chemicals it has deemed safe to use. (The EPA rejected the request last year.)
The Pods Are Plastic bill faces uncertain prospects in the New York City Council. If it does pass, however, it will only go a short way toward mitigating laundry-related microplastic pollution. Research suggests that billions of plastic microfibres shear off of our clothing every day—when we wear them, when we wash and dry them. And even more microplastics are released upstream, when clothes are manufactured.
“It’s a multi-faceted issue,” said Judith Weis, a professor emeritus of biological sciences at Rutgers University. To solve it, environmental advocates are calling for more systemic solutions—not just a ban on PVA, but new laws requiring washing machine filters, better clothing design, and a shift away from fast fashion.
Long before consumers crack open a container of Tide Pods, their laundry has already begun generating microplastic pollution. That’s because some 60% of clothing today is made with plastic. Polyester, nylon, acrylic, spandex—they’re all just different types of fossil fuel-derived plastic fabric. And more plastic clothing could be on the horizon, as fossil fuel companies pivot to plastic production in response to the world’s transition away from using fossil fuels for electricity generation and transportation.
Most media attention has focused on microplastics that slough off of clothing in the wash. And for good reason: According to a 2019 study in the journal Nature, washing machines can generate up to 1.5 million plastic microfibres per kilogram of washed fabric. Too small to get caught in standard washing machine filters, some 200,000 to 500,000 metric tonnes of these microfibres slip out into wastewater every year and eventually make their way into the marine environment. That’s about a third of all microplastics that directly enter the world’s oceans.
Ocean microplastics are linked to a range of deleterious health effects in marine animals, including inhibited development, reproductive issues, genetic damage, and inflammation. Weis said these observations are alarming for their own sake—“I’m concerned about the marine animals themselves,” she told Grist—but they could also have implications for the health of humans, who might eat microplastics-contaminated seafood. Researchers have found microplastics throughout people’s bodies—in their brains, bloodstreams, kidneys, and, most recently, in 62 of 62 placentas tested—and it’s not yet clear what the impacts could be.
But, as Grist reported last year, there are still many other ways that microplastics escape from our clothing. Just wearing plastic clothes, for instance, causes abrasion and the subsequent release of microplastics into the air. Some researchers think this actually causes more microplastic pollution than doing laundry; they estimate that a single person’s normal clothing use could release more than 900 million microfibres per year, compared to just 300 million from washing.
And then there’s the manufacturing stage, which is perhaps the least understood source of plastic microfibre pollution. Every part of the clothes-making process can release microplastics, from the initial polymerisation of natural gas and oil to the actual weaving, knitting, and subsequent processes that turn fabric into garments. According to a 2021 white paper from the nonprofit The Nature Conservancy and the consulting firm Bain and Company, abrasion from dyeing, printing, and pre-washing clothes releases billions of plastic microfibre particles into factory wastewater every day—and not all of these particles are destroyed or filtered out by wastewater treatment.
The white paper estimates that pre-consumer textile manufacturing releases about 120,000 metric tonnes of microplastics into the environment annually—less than laundry or wearing clothing, but the same order of magnitude.
At the opposite end of the textile life cycle are even more opportunities for synthetic clothes to shed microplastics. Disposed textiles that are incinerated can release microfibre— and hazardous chemicals—into the air, while those that are littered or sent to a landfill can release them into the soil. There is some evidence to suggest that earthworms and other organisms can transport these microplastics into deeper layers of soil, where they are more likely to contaminate groundwater.
“While it’s absolutely important to make sure we’re addressing loss that occurs during the wearing and washing phase, … it’s even more important to make sure we’re addressing microfibre pollution across the full life cycle,” said Alexis Jackson, associate director of The Nature Conservancy’s California oceans programme.
