Patagonia's New Study Finds Fleece Jackets Are A Serious Pollutant

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Patagonia's New Study Finds Fleece Jackets Are A Serious Pollutant

The brand commissioned a study to find out how many synthetic microfibres-the tiny bits of plastic that marine scientists say could be jeopardising our oceans-are shed from its jackets in the wash. The results aren't pretty.

It all started on a beach in southwestern England in the early 2000s. Richard Thompson, then a senior lecturer at Plymouth University (where he now serves as professor of marine biology), was leading a team of graduate students researching microplastics in marine environments. Examining samples of sandy sediment, they expected to find degraded bits of marine plastic from decades-old flotsam or plastic beads that were becoming widely used in cleaners. To their surprise, most of the plastic fragments were fibrous, which meant they likely came from clothing, rope, or some types of packaging.

Then, in 2011, Mark Browne, one of Thompson's former graduate students, published a study in which he examined sediment sampled from 15 beaches around the world. He found high concentrations of polyester and acrylic fibres in samples taken near wastewater treatment plants. He then ran a polyester fleece jacket through the wash and filtered 1,900 fibres from the wastewater-fibres that otherwise would have gone to the local wastewater treatment plant. Browne started reaching out to apparel makers to see if they'd help fund research to study this issue more deeply-eventually, he hoped, finding tweaks to fabric design or apparel construction that would stop the microfibres from entering wastewater. He received one offer of help-from women's clothing brand Eileen Fisher-but Patagonia, Columbia, and other big brands declined, saying they didn't know if the fibres were anything they needed to worry about.

Fast-forward four more years, and the fibres finally got everyone's attention. The science was piling on, showing that wastewater treatment plants couldn't filter out all synthetic fibres, and that toxins such as DDT and PCBs can bind to them as they make their way into watersheds. It also showed that small aquatic species ingest the fibres, and that fish and bivalves sold for human consumption also contain microfibres. Experiments have shown that microplastics can lead to poor health outcomes in some species, and research is underway to find out how the plastics affect humans.

Jill Dumain, director of environmental strategy at Patagonia, was one of the people paying attention to all the news. In early 2015, she and the company's leadership decided to commission a study to find out if and how Patagonia's iconic and well-loved fleeces and some other synthetic products were contributing to the problem. The results recently came in, and they're not good.

The study, performed by graduate students at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that during laundering, a single fleece jacket sheds as many as 250,000 synthetic fibres-significantly more than the 1,900 fibres Browne first recorded. Based on an estimate of consumers across the world laundering 100,000 Patagonia jackets each year, the amount of fibres being released into public waterways is equivalent to the amount of plastic in up to 11,900 grocery bags.

The experiment involved five pieces of apparel: three Patagonia fleece jackets, each with slightly different construction, as well as a nylon shell jacket that contains polyester insulation, plus a fifth specimen-a "budget" fleece jacket made by an undisclosed brand. Replicates of each jacket were washed multiple times, both in front-loading and top-loading washing machines. The effluent from each cycle was collected and put through a two-step filtration system that captured fibres with both a 333- and 20-micrometer mesh screen.

The jackets were then put through a 24-hour "killer wash," which Patagonia uses to simulate the aging of a garment. The researchers did this to test whether older garments might shed more fibres as they age. After repeating the washing tests on these artificially aged jackets, they saw that age indeed increases fibre release by 80%!

In previous studies, researchers counted the total number of fibres, but that was not a viable path for this study, which instead calculated their mass. "We fully intended to do counts, but in the volumes of water that we collected and filtered, there were simply so many-hundreds of thousands-of fibres from each test, we knew quickly that even with five of us on the research team, we did not have time or energy to do individual counts," says Stephanie Karba, the lead researcher on the UCSB team.

Using an equation widely used in the textile industry to determine fibre count based on mass, researchers found that the highest estimate of fibres released from a single jacket was 250,000, and the average across all jackets was 81,317 fibres.

Hoping to publish its detailed methodology in a science journal, the team hasn't revealed all its findings. But in addition to data about fibre release, the Patagonia report shows that fibre loss is directly related to the type of washing machine and the age of the garment. Garments released five times as many microfibres when washed in top-loading washing machines compared to front-loaders. And aging affected fibre loss differently for different garments based on the type of washer. For example, compared to Patagonia jackets, the average mass of fibre shed from the budget jacket of undisclosed origin was much higher when it was washed at the new stage in a front-loader. But after all the jackets were aged, the Patagonia jackets shed a comparable amount of fibres to the budget jacket. In top-loaders, the budget jacket shed a comparable amount of fibre, on average, to the others when new.

Another surprise: The nylon shell jacket actually released a comparable amount of fibre to the fleece jackets in some tests, and even more in other tests, seeming to indicate that the polyester fill escaped through seams or the shell fabric.

Having reviewed the findings, Richard Thompson, the Plymouth University scientist whose work knocked over the first domino, says Patagonia's report might be more useful for Patagonia than for the scientific community because it does not take a vastly different approach than Browne's research. He says he'd have preferred if Patagonia's tests had been done with the use of detergent (the UCSB researchers say detergent would have clogged the filters, which is also why Browne did not use detergent in his 2011 research) and on a wider selection of apparel items.

"The budget jacket seems to perform worse in some tests but better in others, but even if it performed consistently better or worse, you can still only reach the conclusion for that one budget jacket of unknown origin," he says. Still, he thinks it was an important first move by industry. "Honestly, some companies might shy away from this; they might not want to open a can of worms. So it's a environmentally responsible move and potentially quite risky, since there is not much data out there on everyone else's apparel."

Add to the list of concerns unique to the outdoor industry: chemical additives in performance apparel (think waterproof-breathable duds) that enter the water along with the fibres.

Of course, apparel companies are far from the only stakeholders being thrust into the spotlight. The role washing machines play in microfibre pollution is also a major concern, and scientists and apparel companies are calling on appliance manufacturers to investigate the efficacy of adding filters to washing machines to capture fibres before they enter wastewater. The problem will grow with the rise in the number of washing machines coming into use globally-Swedish statistician Hans Rosling says 2 billion of the 7 billion people on earth used washing machines in 2010, but he predicts that 5 billion out of the 9 billion humans expected to populate the earth by 2050 will use the appliances.

A study published last month showed that while wastewater treatment plants remove more than 98% of plastic fragments from wastewater, they still send an estimated 65 million pieces of microplastics into watersheds each day. Polyester, the main fibre used in fleece, makes up the largest share of the plastics that get through-even though it only accounts for 10.8% of the plastic in influent wastewater (water that enters the plant). Also, many fibres that do get captured often end up in environmental sludge, which is sometimes added to fertilizer.

To try to get ahead of the problem, Patagonia and other apparel companies have said they want to research new yarn and fabric constructions to determine whether microfibre shedding can be addressed through better design, something that's already happening in Europe.

After a 2013 European Commission-funded research programme called Mermaids found that surfactants in detergents lead to much higher fibre loss-on the order of 1 million fibres shed from a single fleece jacket-textile specialists in Spain & Italy were tasked with developing a special coating or impregnation that would be applied to the fabric during manufacture and, in theory, reduce the amount of fibre loss. More details on the programme are expected in December, but researchers say the coatings being tested & developed are environmentally benign.