The Arctic Ocean Is Teeming With Microfibers From Clothes
Posted on AllSides January 12th, 2021
From The Center
THROW A POLYESTER sweater in the washing machine and it’ll come out nice and clean, but also not quite its whole self. As it rinses, millions of synthetic fibers will shake loose and wash out with the waste water, which then flows to a treatment plant. Each year, a single facility might pump 21 billion of these microfibers out to sea, where they swirl in currents, settle in sediments, and end up as fish food, with untold ecological consequences.
Everywhere scientists look in the world’s oceans, they’re finding microfibers, technically...
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