This story was first published by Grist. Get Grist’s weekly newsletter here.
Last month, James Gennaro, a Democratic New York City Council Member, put forward a bill to change how many New Yorkers do their laundry—by prohibiting laundry detergent pods.
More precisely, the bill, called “Pods Are Plastic,” suggested prohibiting dishwashing and laundry detergent pods with a coating of polyvinyl alcohol, a type of plastic that breaks down in water. Laundry and soap companies have long argued that the PVA coating is completely safe and fully biodegradable, but supporters of the bill say that neither of those claims is true.
“Products and profit should not harm the environment,” Sarah Paiji Yoo, co-founder of a plastic-free cleaning product company called Blueland, said in a statement. Blueland, which makes PVA-free laundry and dishwasher tablets, helped write the bill and has been a vocal critic of PVA for years. In 2022, the company helped write a request to the EPA to remove PVA from a list of chemicals it has approved for use. (The EPA denied the request last year.)
The future of the Pods Are Plastic bill in the New York City Council is uncertain. If it does pass, it will only partly help reduce microplastic pollution from laundry. Studies show that billions of tiny plastic fibers come off our clothing every day—when we wear them, when we wash and dry them. Even more microplastics are released during clothing manufacturing.
“It’s a complex issue,” said Judith Weis, a retired professor of biological sciences at Rutgers University. To address it, environmental advocates are calling for more comprehensive solutions—not just banning PVA, but new laws mandating washing machine filters, improved clothing design, and a move away from fast fashion.
Well before consumers open a container of Tide Pods, their laundry has already started creating microplastic pollution. This is because around 60 percent of clothing today is made of plastic. Polyester, nylon, acrylic, spandex—all are different types of plastic fabric derived from fossil fuels. There could be even more plastic clothing in the future, as fossil fuel companies shift to producing more plastic in response to the world’s move away from using fossil fuels for electricity and transportation.
Most media attention focuses on tiny plastic particles that come off clothing in the wash. And for good reason: According to a 2019 study study in the journal Nature, washing machines can produce up to 1.5 million plastic microfibers per kilogram of fabric washed. Too small to be caught in standard washing machine filters, some 200,000 to 500,000 metric tons of these microfibers escape into wastewater every year and eventually find their way into the marine environment. That’s about a third of all microplastics that directly enter the world’s oceans.
Microplastics in the ocean are connected to a variety of harmful health effects in marine animals, such as hindering development, reproductive problems, genetic damage, and inflammation. Weis said these observations are troubling for the well-being of marine animals themselves—“I’m concerned about the marine animals themselves,” she told Grist—but they could also have implications for human health, as people may consume seafood contaminated with microplastics. Researchers have found microplastics throughout people’s bodies—in their brains, flowing through the blood, kidneys, and, recently, in 62 out of 62 placentas that were tested—and it’s not yet clear what the effects could be.
But, as Grist reported last year, there are still many other ways that microplastics escape from our clothing. Simply wearing plastic clothes, for example, causes rubbing and then the release of microplastics into the air. Some researchers believe this actually causes more microplastic pollution than doing laundry; they estimate that a single person’s regular clothing use could release more than 900 million microfibers per year, compared to just 300 million from washing.
And then there’s the production stage, which is perhaps the least understood source of plastic microfiber pollution. Every part of the clothes-making process can release microplastics, from the initial creation of natural gas and oil to the actual weaving, knitting, and subsequent processes that turn fabric into garments. According to a 2021 white paper from the nonprofit The Nature Conservancy and the consulting firm Bain and Company, rubbing from dyeing, printing, and pre-washing clothes releases billions of plastic microfiber particles into factory wastewater every day—and not all of these particles are destroyed or filtered out by wastewater treatment.
The white paper estimates that pre-consumer textile manufacturing releases about 120,000 metric tons of microplastics into the environment annually—less than laundry or wearing clothing, but the same order of magnitude.
At the opposite end of the textile life cycle are even more opportunities for synthetic clothes to shed microplastics. Discarded textiles that are burned can release microfibers—and hazardous chemicals—into the air, while those that are littered or sent to a landfill can release them into the soil. There is some evidence to suggest that earthworms and other organisms can transport these microplastics into deeper layers of soil, where they are more likely to contaminate groundwater.
“While it’s absolutely important to make sure we’re addressing loss that occurs during the wearing and washing phase, … it’s even more important to make sure we’re addressing microfiber pollution across the full life cycle,” said Alexis Jackson, associate director of The Nature Conservancy’s California oceans program.
Unlike other sources of microplastic pollution, detergent pods are intentionally added to laundry. They date back to the early 2010s, when Procter and Gamble introduced its now-infamous PVA-coated Tide Pods—described at the time as the firm’s biggest laundry innovation in a quarter of a century. The PVA design, which reportedly took eight years to come up with, really was a breakthrough: It separated cleansers, brighteners, and fabric softeners into separate chambers so they wouldn’t mix before entering the wash cycle. And, unlike previous designs, PVA film could dissolve in either hot or cold water.
Over the past nine years, laundry detergent pods’ market value in the U.S. has grown by 36 percent to $3.25 billion; it’s projected to exceed $3.5 billion by 2025.
To protect that growth, laundry industry trade groups have assured consumers that pods’ PVA plastic coating will biodegrade and not harm people or ecosystems. The American Cleaning Institute, which represents U.S. cleaning product companies including Procter and Gamble, SC Johnson, and Unilever, contends that, “[w]hen in contact with moisture and microorganisms, PVA breaks down into harmless parts, making it a more environmentally friendly option compared to traditional plastics.”
But some experts disagree. Notably, a study in 2021 review of literature conducted by researchers at Arizona State University—and requested by Blueland—discovered that less than a quarter of the PVA that enters wastewater treatment plants actually decomposes; 77 percent, about 8,000 metric tons per year, is released into the environment intact. This is not because PVA cannot be broken down by microorganisms; it is just that the appropriate microorganisms are often not present in wastewater treatment plants, or the PVA does not remain at the plants long enough to actually break down. Based on a research supported by cleaning product industry groups, it can take 28 days for at least 60 percent of PVA to decompose and 60 days for 90 percent of it to degrade.
There isn’t “a single wastewater treatment plant in the United States where water sits with those microbes for anything close to 28 days,” Charles Rolsky, a coauthor of the Blueland-funded study who now works as a senior research scientist at the Shaw Institute in Maine, told The Washington Post in 2022. “At most, it might be a week, but more realistically it’s days to hours.”
In response to Grist’s request for comment, the American Cleaning Institute condemned “the misinformation campaign being waged by Blueland” and said the New York City bill to ban PVA was “unnecessary.” A spokesperson for the trade group directed Grist to previously published statements and an online chart stating that the type of PVA used in laundry detergent pods is of a higher quality than the PVA analyzed by the Blueland-funded study, and that laundry pod PVA “dissolves completely and biodegrades within hours of wastewater treatment.”
Procter and Gamble referred Grist to the American Cleaning Institute’s communications team.
Addressing the clothing microplastics issue will require a variety of solutions. Currently, most of the focus is on washing machine filters that environmentally conscious consumers can install in their homes. The best filters available today can potentially trap upwards of 80 percent of laundry microplastics. Adjacent technologies—like the Cora Ball or Guppyfriend bag that can be placed in washing machines along with laundry—may also help.
A small number of states have considered laws to make filters mandatory for appliance manufacturers, or to encourage the purchase of filters through consumer rebates. Some companies—like Samsung—are trying to get ahead of potential regulation by developing their own filter technologies that can be attached to standard machines; others are designing washing machines with built-in microplastics filters.
Meanwhile, scientists are attempting to create clothes that won't shed as many microfibers in the first place. Yarns with more twists and woven structures, for example, tend to release fewer microfibers, as do fabrics cut with heat and lasers (as opposed to scissors).
“I’m optimistic that science can solve this problem,” said Juan Hinestroza, a professor of fiber science and apparel design at Cornell University. With adequate research funding, he believes it’ll be possible—within less than a generation—to design synthetic clothing that sheds virtually no microplastics.
Maybe the most complete solution would be to control and reduce the use of plastics for clothing and laundry completely. The fast fashion industry is a major cause of the microplastics issue, mainly due to the large amount of synthetic clothing it makes. Weis suggested it’s time to make major clothing companies responsible for the microplastics their products release, possibly through laws that make companies financially liable for the waste and pollution they create. New York state is currently looking at this, though it mostly relates to packaging, not clothes or microplastics. Weis also called for general plastic restrictions as part of the global plastics treaty currently being negotiated by the United Nations. such a law, although it mostly relates to packaging, not clothes or microplastics. Weis also called for general plastic restrictions as part of the global plastics treaty currently being negotiated by the United Nations.
Yoo also supports similar solutions. However, she’s still pushing for the New York City bill banning PVA. “This bill is about so much more than just pods,” she said. “I get it when people are like, ‘This is not the biggest problem,’ … but I think this can be a really important starting point. It sends an important signal to businesses that plastic products should not be designed to go down our drains and into our water.”
This article was originally published in Grist at https://grist.org/regulation/detergent-pods-are-only-the-start-of-clothings-microplastic-pollution-problem/.
