Your Fleece Jacket Pollutes the Ocean. Here’s the Possible Fix.

Author:  Mary Catherine O’Connor | Published: May 25, 2017 

By now you’ve probably heard the news: your favorite fleece sheds hundreds of thousands of tiny synthetic fibers every time it’s washed. Those fibers often skirt through wastewater treatment plants and make their way into aquatic organisms that eat the floating fibers. That’s bad for the fish, because the fibers are vectors for toxins and can retard their growth, and it could be bad for people who eat the fish.

This shedding puts outdoor manufacturers in a bind: many want to protect the outdoors, but they also want to sell product. Consumers who love their warm fleece are also faced with a dilemma.

Some brands have taken steps to address the threat of microfibers, which are considered a type of microplastic pollution. In 2015, Patagonia asked university researchers to quantify how much fiber its products shed during laundry—the answer was a lot. And the Outdoor Industry Association has convened a working group to start examining microfiber pollution. But here’s the thing: rather than using money to develop a process that prevents the shedding, most brands are still focused on defining their culpability. Because there are other sources of microfiber pollution in the sea, such as fraying fishing ropes, these brands want to be able to know for certain how much they’re contributing before they move further.

That won’t be an easy task, but Mountain Equipment Co-op, an REI-like retailer headquartered in Vancouver, recently gave microplastics researchers at the Vancouver Aquarium a $37,545 grant to help scientists develop a tracking process. The yearlong project will be led by the aquarium’s ocean pollution research program director and senior scientist Peter Ross. The first step is to create a database of fibers from up to 50 different textiles commonly used in MEC’s house-brand apparel.

This won’t be a simple spreadsheet with the names of the polymers, like polyester or nylon. Each piece of outdoor apparel is treated with chemicals like a durable water repellant (DWR). Then there’s the kaleidoscope of colors in each brand’s catalog. Those variants give the fibers a unique profile, sort of like a fingerprint. To capture those fingerprints, Ross and his team will use a machine called a Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectrometer, which looks at the fibers on a molecular level.

Once that database is created, the researchers will subject the fibers to saltwater, sunlight, wave action, freshwater, and bacteria to mimic the types of weatherization that they would experience in the field. In fact, one set of fibers will be staked out in Vancouver Harbor and another in the Frasier River estuary. A third set, for the sake of experimentation, will be artificially weathered inside the aquarium’s lab. After increments of time—30, 60, 90, and 180 days—the fibers will be reexamined and any changes in those polymer fingerprints will be documented and added to a database. The hope is that sometime in the future, a random synthetic microfiber could be pulled from Vancouver Bay, analyzed, and determined to originate from an MEC jacket.

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