Praying for cotton and wool to become stylish. And I hope we get creative with natural fibers like linen, beech fiber, spider silk, et.
One cotton t-shirt equals 2,700 liters of water—what one person drinks in two-and-a-half years. Google about Aral Sea. Cotton farming is also responsible for 24 percent of insecticides and 11 percent of pesticides despite using about 3 percent of the world’s arable land. https://www.wri.org/blog/2017/07/apparel-industrys-environme...
The water people drink is negligible percentage of overall water usage. Compare a single shower vs a weeks drinking water.
Buy good quality clothing with timeless styling (not fashionable, or worse fast fashion). Take good care of it. They can potentially last decades if taken care of properly (obviously not cycling the same three shirts every week, but a proper wardrobe that’s seasonal with enough option for any occasion). Goes a long way.
I have nice looking shirts (that are hardly dated nor much frayed) from 20 years ago. I buy all cotton, and organic if I can. Proper and not too-frequent washing can help.
What makes washing proper (or improper)? How frequent is too frequent?
We can legislate to stop producing it, or drastically reduce it. We did so with CFCs to stop destroying the ozone layer. The doomsayers weren't the scientists who predicted the problems, but those who said we'd lose refrigeration etc.
They were wrong. Legislation helped the ozone layer and society did fine. The same will happen if we legislate on plastic as we did on CFCs.
I have nice looking shirts (that are hardly dated nor much frayed) from 20 years ago. I buy all cotton, and organic if I can. Proper and not too-frequent washing can help.
What makes washing proper (or improper)? How frequent is too frequent?
Cold or warm wash, don’t overagitate air dried helps a lot.
I don't like plastic in the air any more than anyone else does, but 1) stop wearing those stupid fucking polyester hoodies (and other artificial fibers; aka your socks, gym shirts and underpants) -that's where most of it comes from. I'm looking at you, SF hacker nerds. 2) Even assuming the entire population of the Western US breathed all that plastic waste in and it was permanently deposited in the lungs: 1000e3 kg/…
Most consumer plastic ends up in a landfill and typically don't leech microplastics in to the watertable. Fishing nets on the other hand? Top polluter in the ocean https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/great-pacifi...
I don't know about the oceans proper or the rest of the "western US" that we seek to address in our parent article, but I was specifically told the biggest source of microplastics in Califonia's coastal waster was car tires.
This is obviously a huge overestimate. But go actually weigh out 10 grams of flour on your kitchen scale. Do you really think you have more diesel exhaust in your lungs than that?
Weight from a full Year? Absolutely. Volume - probably not. It won't take up even close to as much space as the flour. That diesel exhaust also weighs much more than the hydro(1)carbon(12) chains flour is made from, simply because things like N(14)O(16) and metals in the particulate matter are much, much heavier.
Diesel exhaust soot density is in the 1 to 2 g/cm3 range. Flour is about 0.6 g/cm3. So the soot is indeed a bit heavier. But you can adjust the amount of flour you weigh out to visualize the volume, and it still seems like a lot. The point your parent comment was making still seems valid to me.
I could not immediately find a reference for typical soot exposure.
I don't like plastic in the air any more than anyone else does, but 1) stop wearing those stupid fucking polyester hoodies (and other artificial fibers; aka your socks, gym shirts and underpants) -that's where most of it comes from. I'm looking at you, SF hacker nerds. 2) Even assuming the entire population of the Western US breathed all that plastic waste in and it was permanently deposited in the lungs: 1000e3 kg/…
> stop wearing those stupid fucking polyester hoodies According to this chart, the main sources of pollution are by far wear and tear from car tyres and road surfaces. Synthetic clothing comes last. https://i.imgur.com/KmbY72h.jpg That being said, one should never forget secondary effects of reducing consumption which is economic stagnation, which in turn leads to inequality and social unrest. At the same time, it is…
63% from cars (tyres, road surfaces, paint marks) [0].
No one yet know has bad it is. Plus living near the road causes
* cancer, asthma, reduced lung growth in children [1]
* dementia, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis [2]
Killing millions worldwide [3] and injuring millions just in USA [4]