Avoiding use of plastic might seem like an obvious approach, but good luck convincing fleece lovers in cold climates

Scientists have accumulated ample evidence that plastic pollution is a dire problem in Arctic waters and along the region’s coastlines, as discussed during the first day of the International Symposium on Plastics in the Arctic and the Sub-Arctic Region. Presentations during the second day of the symposium gave a sense of how challenging it will be to address the problem.

Consider just one of many sources of marine plastic litter: your clothing.

In a lot of places, clothing is something that we, for at least part of the year, choose based on its ability to keep us warm. And, depending on your fashion sensibilities, you probably prefer that it lasts for several seasons. For the oceans, that is bad news.

That’s because most of our modern winter clothes are made from artificial fibres, essentially a form of plastic that is spun into thread and woven into cloth. These fabrics provide numerous benefits: they are lightweight, quick drying, highly insulating, and remarkably resistant to wear. But those benefits come at a cost to the natural environment.

Your typical five-kilogram load of laundry releases perhaps 6 million microfibres, tiny bits of fabric that your clothing sheds while being washed. Depending on how conscientious you are (you can buy a filter for your washing machine) or where you live (some cities remove microfibres from their wastewater), the actual number of microfibres that reach the sea varies. And laundry is not the only way for microfibres to make their way into wastewater.

If cities do take steps to remove microfibres from wastewater, it can make a dramatic difference, according to Dorte Herzke, an environmental chemist and senior researcher with the Norwegian Institute for Air Research. A recent study she conducted looking at untreated water released by the waste system in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, found that its 2,400 residents sent some 21 billion microscopic particles of plastic into the adjacent fjord each year. Comparisons are hard to come by, she says, but the city of Vancouver, Canada, with 675,000 residents, which does filter its sewerage for microplastics, was found to release 30 billion particles a year — dramatically fewer per capita. In the Arctic, it is the norm that wastewater is only treated for microbial contamination, if that.

The precise source of Svalbard’s microplastic pollution is not known, but Herzke told the symposium on Wednesday that the main suspected culprit is laundry, given the type of particles she collected and that much of the release coincided with times that people were likely to be doing the wash.

Encouraging people to use different kinds of fabrics, or treating existing fabrics differently, might help reduce microfibre pollution, but she cautions that it would be a hard sell to get the people of Longyearbyen and places like it to accept lower-performing fabrics.

“We have to remember that people in the Arctic really like their fleeces and their wool to keep them warm,” she says.

Artificial fabrics, and indeed all sorts of plastic products, do what they are supposed to do on land, but once they hit the water they become a scourge.

“The question is what do you want from a fabric,” says Lisbet Sørensen, a chemist with SINTEF, a Norwegian research outfit, who has studied how artificial fibres break down. “Do you want it to be durable, or do you want it to degrade fast once the particles get into the environment?”

(Wool-lovers don’t get off the hook entirely: The dyes and other chemicals used to turn wool into yarn and yarn into clothing are themselves types of pollutants.)

The most obvious way to keep plastic out of the water is to not use it all, reckons A.N. de Vries, a resource-management specialist with the University Centre of the Westfjords. “But that’s not possible, because we are still going to need it in so many ways,” she says.  

Instead, de Vries suggests addressing plastic pollution at the points where it enters natural environments. Rivers, which are big contributors to plastic marine litter because they can transport large amounts of waste of all sizes over long distances, should get particular attention, she believes.

Another approach, recommends Georg Hanke, a scientific officer with the European Commission, is for scientists to make sure that lawmakers know when a situation requires their attention, and what the costs of doing something (or not doing something) will be.

The EU already employs what he calls “triggers for action.” These, he explains, are things like threshold values that indicate when scientists believe political attention is warranted. One of the EU’s triggers, for example, is a limit of 20 pieces of litter on a 100-metre stretch of coastline. Arctic countries, he says, ought to consider setting their own limits.

“Policy needs evidence,” Hanke says. “Whatever the measure, there will be some costs, so policymakers need to be sure it is the right thing to do.”