Clothing fibres polluting oceans: report

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – They may be small, but microscopic fibres from our clothes are ending up in our oceans and harming wildlife, according to a study from Oceanwise and Metro Vancouver on the Lower Mainland’s wastewater.

Scientists put the region’s wastewater under the microscope and found that 1.8 trillion tiny bits of plastic, 71 per cent of which are fibres from clothes in our washing machines, are making their way to treatment plants every year and 30 billion are still making it through to the ocean.

“Every time clothing is washed, tiny strands of fabric break off and go down the drain,” said Dr. Peter Ross, vice-president of research at Ocean Wise and lead investigator. “Research has shown that microplastics in the ocean are being mistaken for food by zooplankton and fish, raising concerns about impacts to their health.”

Ross says the effects have consequences all the way up the food chain as many animals rely on plankton as a primary food source.

“Nobody thought it was a real issue or problem until scientists started looking at under the microscope a little more closely and wondering why there’s all these little colourful bits and pieces and ‘oh my goodness, we’re finding them in the Antarctic, the Arctic, open ocean., sediment, water column and in the food web’ and realizing we suddenly had a completely global environmental problem,” Ross said.

The collaboration study is the first of its kind in Canada, and Ross hopes the results help pinpoint the sources of the problem and prompt cities, engineers and individuals to come up with creative solutions to reducing microplastics in wastewater.

“These results clearly demonstrate our wastewater treatment facilities are highly effective in keeping most of these harmful particles out of our oceans, but we can all do better by simply changing our laundry habits.” Metro Vancouver’s chair of the utilities committee Darrell Mussatto said.

Metro Vancouver says anyone can do their part by doing laundry less frequently, using front-loading laundry machines, using cold water and less soap and installing a lint trap or lint filter on a washing machine’s discharge hose.

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