If synthetic fabrics go, hooooo boy... talk about an industrial shakeup. Polyester accounts for ~50% of global fabric production. Non-plastic synthetic fibers made from wood pulp are pretty bad for the environment (you basically use harsh chemicals to liquefy wood and turn that into new fibers). The only thing "performance-wise" that comes close is wool, which is also not very sustainable, and difficult to care for. This seems like it'll become the next "anti-smoking" battle.
Well we do have a decent source for fibres in the form of Hemp. The Hemp fibre is longer and stronger than a cotton fibre, but the political favours pulled by the US Cotton growers association in the past has indirectly helped to bring man made fibres like these into play as a cheap alternative source for clothing and covers.
This issue, isnt restricted to clothing made of man made fibres, it will affect the leisure industry because tents & gazebo's are made of nylon and their exposure to the elements degrades them quickly. Footwear, trainers, sneakers watch how the likes of Nike handle this both for consumers and their employees.
Man made fibre's are everywhere and are the next Asbestos scandal, so watch how big business handles this one. The science will be restricted, there might be some private studies commissioned by some big names and the findings kept quiet. I've seen stock market listed supermarkets commission studies, results come back and it all gets hushed up!
A lot of Global businesses should best be viewed as a threat to your health!
Your politicians wont do anything about it either, they dont represent you they represent their unlined pockets!
This is a matter do be checked with some detail, since some position against wool have become vocal: wool is, as expected, biodegradable (though it may be subject to chemical treatments that ruin this property); wool is recyclable, both as fabric and as industrial-use material (e.g. as an insulant); as a material for clothing, the excellent properties relative to the other options include durability (which of course - though nowadays the full importance of durability seems to be a neglected idea - reduces environmental impact); processes for the production of wool may entail some impact, independent from the material but related to the sheep.
> processes for the production of wool may entail some impact, independent from the material but related to the sheep.
I suspect this is the massively buried lead here - one so huge and so buried that I'm having a hard time giving you the benefit of the doubt.
The lifecycle of wool itself is probably not at all the major concern. It will not take just a few more sheep to replace the entirety of the global use of polyester and other synthetics.
Livestock are notoriously land-intensive, and the reason behind much of the ongoing ecological devastation of places like the Amazon rainforest. Trying to pass those concerns off as minor considerations after the biodegradability and recyclability of wool is just... incredible.
> Trying to pass those concerns off as minor considerations after the biodegradability and recyclability of wool is just... incredible.
You wrote «is»: did you mean «would be»? Who is «trying to pass those concerns off as minor considerations»?
There have been in some areas bureaucratic issues with wool, as if it were "warning-label class material": this has / has had people check a few facts.
Edit: which by the way means, some wool may have been treated in a way that raised concern in public health monitoring entities. Think of the Amazon, but do not forget those thing that are there touching your skin. You could want to look into it.
Anyway: when the issue is with production, maybe there are ways to partially fix it. Were the material toxic, you'd have in a way a bigger problem.
And anyway, surely the vast majority of us HN members reasons through quantities and vets the given puzzle pieces to at least some extent: as ericd noted, Cost/Risks/Benefit analysis are duly as what you have are options, with different tradeoffs and complications, and having further promising ones is certainly beneficial.
The 8-billion-pound elephant in the room is the number of people that need clothing. Wool, and eating meat, can be sustainable if demand is below an environmental-degradation threshhold. We're living "high on the bog" of the riches that petroleum provides, and weaning is painful (but worth it, if enough of us care about the life-stories of our great-great-etc-grandchildren).
You can’t have everything. You can pump oil and make plastic, but that’s got obvious problems. Cotton is extremely water intensive (and land). Grazing sheep are land intensive. Which one you think is best depends on what vector of ecological destruction you care most about. Maybe oil just let us get to more people than the Earth actually has carrying capacity for.
Yes, but in most cases, the wool today is considered waste; the primary market value of sheep is between mowing fields naturally and the meat. Which is why the industry has died as it has.
Tangent: HEPA filters are one of the best QoL investments you can make. You should start caring about what you breathe right now if you don’t already.
WHO recently tightened PM2.5 guidance closer to zero and all the evidence so far is that the more we learn about PM1 and finer pollution, the more horrifying the health effects.
HEPA really isn’t good, the way hepa filters are manufactured and discarded is really bad for the environment. A better alternative is electro static and ionizing filters that are cleanable, like airdog provides. The tech isn’t new, but the industry isn’t interested in not making money on disposable hepa filters..
Smaller Ionizers release really small amounts of ozone, airdog isn’t mainly using ionizing, the bigger filter is the electrostatic one. Ozone machines are dangerous though, but it’s no secret. You really shouldn’t use any ionizer in a non ventilated space for a long time though, it will build up
From the article, there doesn't seem to be much of a conclusion rather than more studies are needed, since the technology is poorly understood. And I agree, the idea is that ionization happens naturally, it does, especially after lightning strikes, which then pulls particles downwards to the ground and nearby objects, the same happens indoor. This is good, particles <2.5ppm are attached to objects and usually stay attached and can be removed by wiping, the article you linked to targets gasses and their reactions to ionization in industrial ionizers which is the poorly understood parts. The article also doesn't compare home HEPA efficiency vs home Ionization, so it's not clear which is better or worse. Most modern air pumps also use ionization to clean the air, mainly using plasma (since it's the fastest), so ionization is already widely used in homes.
The problem with HEPA filters are the destruction of resources to make them, the bad controls of their quality and their short lifespan (Cheap home HEPA filter needs exchanging every 3 months) and their high price (>30€).
Yes, most of the HEPA air purifiers are trash, offered like as a "subscription service" due to the large cost and short lifespan (6 months in average) of the filters.
But there are other options like Sharp KCA50EUW [0] with an advertised filter life span of up to 10 years. A more trendy and smart offering is Electrolux PA91-404DG, albeit it has a shorter filter lifespan (could not find the number now but if my memory is right then it's 2 years).
If I understand correctly the air purifier you linked to is exactly one of those ionizing air purifiers producing unintended unresearched chemicals.
HEPA purifiers aren't trash, they are simply producing trash. For me that is a lesser evil to producing potentially dangerous chemicals in my home. Just like I accept using FFP2-masks that aren't reusable in contrast to cloth masks used at the start of the pandemic. There are other places where saving trash is has less negative impact than health products.
Wear merino, and help it last a long time by not washing it (or washing it gently). If our bodies don't stink (thanks to ammonia-eating bacteria like Nitrosomonas eutropha) we don't need to wash clothing as often, nor do we need to shower. Rolling in dirt like birds and horses is a stretch for most of us, but I think we'll figure out some way.
If you haven’t, you owe it to yourself to try merino wool shirts. Check to make sure you get just the 100% wool models, most brands have pure and blends.
I tried five different brands, from $40 to $120; only one was decently comfortable (most were itchy, stretched weirdly and were uncomfortable) and the extra burden of washing and maintenance, not to mention cost, made them a non-starter.
For $5 a shirt, Gildan 100% cotton v-neck t-shirts allow you to buy a couple dozen and rotate through them for years.
That's where I'm currently at, I wanted to love wool, but I just didn't. I've had it on my list to give linen a shot.
Interesting, I haven’t found any of them to be itchy, but maybe some are more sensitive to it them than others. Do you remember which you tried? I like the linen shirts I’ve tried for hot weather, but haven’t tried many yet. Luca Faloni makes nice linen dress shirts.
Outlier was by far the most comfortable, but $120 per shirt and fairly fragile.
Woolly, Icebreaker, Minus33, and I forget the other brand. These were all very bad, I kept the Icebreaker for a couple wears, but everything else I immediately returned.
I’m currently trying Duckworth, I’ve been liking them. They’re a bit of a novelty in that the entire shirt is made sheep to shirt in the US. Only a couple of their lines are pure wool, though, so read carefully. The fabric seems a bit heavier/less soft than others, but they’ve been holding up better so far. Maybe related?
Icebreaker seems like the biggest brand in merino, and their shirts are pretty good, very light and breathable, but a bit fragile (my jeans buttons seem to be forming holes in them somehow, all in the same spot). Big fan of their long underwear, too, makes a huge difference in the winter.
Woolly shirts are super soft, probably the most comfortable, and not too expensive, but even more fragile than icebreaker IME.
Still looking for the perfect shirt, but I’ve liked the ones I’ve had from all of these.
Outlier makes expensive but very nice wool tshirts. I have accumulated a fair number over the years and only see issues with the ones that are over seven years old.
The general principle is that if it can harm adults in high dosages it can equally harm newborns/toddlers in lower dosages due to smaller lung surface area and weight.
We see articles claiming that people have microplastics within their bodies (either lungs or bloodstream), is there any evidence on the weight of contributing causes?
For example, is most of the plastic in bloodstreams due to plastic cookware, tap water, bottled water, sea fish, aquaculture fish, meat?
I cannot check right now owing to time constraints, but I can tell you that in the past few months a comparatively large number of studies seem to have emerged.
One article I met earlier in the year was about creating systems to tag microplastic, in order to follow its path: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30020879 ("New measuring method reveals there may be more plastic “on” than “in” your salad" (phys.org))
Don't assume an agenda, you also had a very positive spin on tech fibers in another thread yesterday [0], perhaps OP felt like we could benefit from an opposing view.
If anything out of scale alone the collective of cotton/wool/linen producers will likely have a lot less lobbying power than the industry around petro-chemical fibers.
But we're due for a serious re-evaluation of where it is appropriate to use it.
Single-use plastics have to be banned globally, outside of critical uses like medical. I know, good luck with this one.
Plastic fabrics need to be severely curtailed, as this study shows.