You’ve likely heard about microplastics, which are known endocrine disruptors. Let’s talk about how to actually stop them!
The biggest percentage of the microplastics that get into your body got there from the synthetic fabrics in your home. That means:
- Polyester clothes (polyester is plastic!), fleeces, and blankets
- Carpets (Most carpets today are made of plastic fibers).
- Furniture fabric (typically plastic fibers)
When these synthetic fabrics are rubbed in the washing machine, and in the course of day to day life, tiny microplastic dust comes off them. This dust floats around the air of your house and settles everywhere. When it lands on food, you eat it. You also can breathe it in while it’s floating around. Children crawling around ingest the microplastic dust that’s on everything.
How do we stop microplastics from synthetic fabrics?
Remember, the source of this microplastic dust is the plastic fabrics already in your home and your clothes.
So you absorb a lot less microplastics, when you replace synthetic fabrics in your life with 100% natural fabrics! That pretty much means 100% cotton and wool.
Replacing synthetic fabrics in your life should start with clothes, especially the fabrics you wear next to your skin as these microplastics have the extra route of absorbing through your skin! (Skin is a very potent absorption route). Replacing underwear with 100% cotton or wool is a good idea. Socks are available too.
Since you may not be ready to totally replace your furniture, you can cover synthetic fabric furniture with a 100% cotton sheet to decrease the amount of microplastic dust that gets into the air. Regularly dusting would help too.
What are the other microplastic sources?
A smaller percentage of microplastics get into your body from your drinking (and cooking) water.
A good water filter will remove these. Your shower water is also a source, but less so as you aren’t drinking it.
Be careful, however, that you don’t get a water filter that removes minerals from your water. A lot of water filters are “too good” at filtering and they remove minerals which need to be in water for your health. Water that is devoid of minerals can apparently leech minerals from your own body, which is likely to be not good for you at all, probably much worse than being exposed to microplastics! A plain activated carbon water filter should remove microplastics without removing minerals. A reverse osmosis water filter will remove minerals, and many of the fancier water filters that promise to remove heavy metals will unfortunately remove minerals too. To the best of my knowledge, you should not use these water filters.
After water, the next source of microplastics is food and cooking exposure, mostly from the plastic lining of cans of acidic foods. The acidic food pulls plastic into the food, which you eat. Using plastic cookware also exposes you to microplastics. Glass and stainless steel (watch out for nickel in stainless steel though) are better ideas. (We don’t recommend aluminum)
Plastic cutting boards are one of the worst offenders though, due to the knife creating bits of plastic when it hits the cutting board. These bits end up in the food.
Microplastic removal priority list
To sum up, we think the priorities for microplastic removal are like this, from highest priority to lowest:
- Replace synthetic underwear with 100% natural fibers.
- Replace synthetic clothes that go through the washing machine frequently
- Replace synthetic sheets, pillowcases, blankets, fleeces, etc
- Replace synthetic carpet and rugs (I know this is difficult!)
- Cover furniture that has synthetic fabric, or replace it
- Replace plastic cutting board
- Filter drinking and cooking water (but don’t use a water filter that remove minerals too! Many of them do.)
- Store acidic foods in glass, not plastic. Try to find sources of acidic foods that don’t package in plastic.
- Replace other plastic cookware (Glass is good, stainless steel is better than plastic or aluminum)
- Filter shower water, if you want perfection!
We’re building a list of sources for all of these: 100% wool underwear, socks, pillows, blankets, and sweaters. They’re quite hard to find – many brands claim to be wool but they are actually a blend of wool and plastic, which doesn’t do as much good.
There’s another large source of microplastic exposure, but you only need to worry about it if you’re outside near the road a lot. Many car tires are made of synthetic rubber, which is basically a type of plastic! (source) When the car drives on the road, the tires give off microplastics. This is a major source of microplastics in the environment, second only to synthetic fabrics. Generally these microplastics are washed off the road by the rain into water sources, which you ultimately will drink, but your drinking water filter will stop this so don’t worry. Microplastics from car tires are only a concern for your body if you are frequently outside and very near the road, breathing in car tire dust. This could be a problem if you walk around cities a lot, or if you work in construction on roads.
What about microplastics in the ocean?
Microplastic pollution into the ocean is a different story. In the ocean, synthetic fabrics and synthetic rubber tires contribute one third of microplastic pollution. Plastic trash contributes the remaining two thirds. Most of this trash does not originate from the US.
Conclusion
I’m not an expert on this topic, but I have read some studies. I noticed that the clickbait articles on microplastics rarely tell you some of these useful things that I found in the studies.
With this info, you can make a big impact on removing microplastics from your life. You can also reduce the amount of microplastics going into the ocean. It starts with switching synthetic fabrics to natural ones!
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