It is well known that traces of plastic and other man-made substances have made their way into most of the Earth’s atmosphere like insects. Four and a half billion pairs of genes were sold worldwide – researchers recently found out how much the presence of denim microfibers violated the natural world. However, it is less commonly known that a common form of pollution is microfiber from your clothing. Denim jeans are considered one of the most popular items of clothing worldwide – in 2018.
Washed fabrics and other fabrics release large amounts of microfiber into the world’s polluted waters, most of which end up in the planet’s water system. In the case of blue denim, washed jeans reveal natural cotton cellulose fibers; which are topped with synthetic blue dyes and other chemical additives to improve the durability of the material. After looking at wastewater unclean samples, the researchers work out that wastewater treatment plants pump about 1 billion blue denim microfibers per day. They also found that a single pair of used jeans could release about 50,000 microfibers per wash cycle.
The Great Lakes of North America and even in the Arctic Archipelago of Canada, While it remains unclear whether it could have any impact on marine life, it does highlight how human footprints can be felt in many corners of the planet, as reported in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology Letters, Canadian scientists have discovered that denim microfiber contamination can be found across lakes in suburbs of Ontario.
Microfibers then started quite a journey. Using various imaging techniques, the team discovered blue denim at 23 percent, 12 percent, and Shallow Suburban Lakes near Toronto and the Arctic Archipelago of Canada, the Great Lakes, 20 percent of all microfibers grown from shallow suburban lakes, respectively. They even found evidence of a blue denim microfiber in the stomach of a fish in the Great Lake.
A clear example of this is the Chinese city of Xintang, the so-called “denim capital of the world” where rivers flow blue and are polluted with water due to the intense focus on denim production. While it is not clear whether this will have a negative impact on aquatic life beyond the influence of microfibers, the denim industry is known to have a huge impact on the environment. It doesn’t just take a bucket of the load to make a pair of jeans – it takes 1,500 gallons of water to increase the amount of cotton to produce a pair – the dyeing and finishing process can introduce all sorts of unpleasant chemicals into water systems.
