Fast-Fashion and Microplastic

### Reader’s Letter to The Guardian, 24th September 2024 ###

Dear Editor,

I read Fleur Britten’s piece on Fast Fashion (The Guardian, 24th September 2024, link below) and found myself nodding all the way through. Indeed, yes, fast fashion and indulgent over-consumption are scourges of modern times.

A couple of years ago I too visited the clothes-market near Nador in Morocco and was also bowled over by the sheer mass of bales of clothing … piled up to the ceilings!

But fashion (and synthetic-clothing in general) has one massive “Achilles Heel” which we seem to repeatedly forget: This is the fact that 35%* of all ocean microplastic (invisible and toxic!) is made up of fluff washed out of garments during regular washing (link below). So the visible mess on the beaches is, unfortunately, only the tip of the iceberg with the far more insidious problem being the fact that sea-organisms are busy ingesting microplastic-fluff washed out of both cheap and expensive clothing. Then, of course, those particles find their way through the food-chain into our bodies.

So the answer is not to simply stop fast-fashion but rather to (urgently!) switch from short-lived synthetic fabric to tougher natural fibres … in ALL clothing!

*: The second biggest contributor to ocean microplastic is particulate matter scuffed from the tread of car- and lorry- tyres, weighing in at 28% of the total! So these two make up TWO THIRDS of all ocean microplastic. Staggering!

Yours,
Alan Mitcham

Link to original article: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2024/sep/24/where-does-the-uks-fast-fashion-end-up-i-found-out-on-a-beach-clean-in-ghana

Link to article on ocean microplastic: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/25/plastic-in-the-depths-how-pollution-took-over-our-oceans


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