Comment | 'We need to take a broader view on textile pollution'

Changes people make to landscapes can persist for a very long time. Most people see daily reminders that our part of the world in North Staffordshire has a lot of history - Iron Age hill forts, medieval roads, historic homes, canals dating back to the region’s heyday as a textile-production hub. But there are more invisible traces of this history in our local environments than we might imagine. And that includes places like the mud at the bottom of our waterways.

Recently, a team of scientists from Keele and Loughborough Universities collected sediment from the bottom of Rudyard Lake, near Leek. In that sediment, we discovered textile fibres dating back to the late 19th century, spanning the UK’s second industrial revolution through to the modern era.  That included cotton and wool which had been preserved in the dark, low-oxygen depths of the lake for over a century.

While most people would imagine natural fibres would break down in the environment, that’s not always the case. Even though the fashion and textiles industry tells consumers ‘natural’ is a better choice, not all these fibres biodegrade. Much environmental research on textile pollution has focused heavily on synthetic fibres made from petroleum - microplastics.

However, growing evidence suggests that natural fibres dominate many environmental samples. These non-plastic fibres receive far less attention. But cotton that’s mercerised or wool that has been treated with aniline dyes may behave differently than the 'raw' material in the environment. That means they may not necessarily be the environmentally friendly alternatives to contemporary synthetic materials like acrylic, nylon, and polyamide that we also find in our local waterways.

When we started this project at Rudyard, we were joined by community scientists who volunteered to bring in water samples from the River Churnet. They all found textile fibres in their river water samples. But did those fibres come from their clothing? Were they airborne from tumble-dryer exhaust? Or had they not been filtered out of laundry effluent going through a waste-water treatment plant? How long had they been circulating in the environment?

Finding that out would be complex, with many possible sources and pathways into the river.  What we could do was look at the sediment at the bottom of the lake to see how long fibres of which types had been accumulating. But that was challenging, too. 

Our team combined methods from palaeolimnology - the study of lake sediments - with archival records and forensic analysis to create a detailed timeline of textile fibre pollution spanning around 150 years.  Rudyard Lake sits downstream of industrial-era manufacturing activity on the River Dane with fibres having been carried into the lake by the Dane Feeder. This makes the lake a natural archive for fibres released by a small number of mills and the area immediately around the lake.

The team applied forensic science methods to recover textile fibres from almost every layer of the lake sediment core, creating what "textile fibre chronology" stretching across approximately 150 years of human activity.

We found that from approximately 1876 to 1979, all textile fibres preserved in the lake sediment were natural in origin – predominantly cotton and wool. After 1979, the number of fibres increased sharply, driven largely by a rise in cotton accumulation.  Our results provide rare historical context, showing that natural fibres have been accumulating in the environment since the early days of industrial textile production.  This sediment record effectively preserved evidence of changing manufacturing practices, clothing consumption and laundry.

The findings have important implications for sustainability strategies that promote natural fibres as a solution to plastic pollution. Replacing synthetic textiles with natural fibres without understanding what they do in the environment risks creating new problems rather than solving existing ones.  So, we are calling for broader assessments of textile pollution that includes both plastic and non-plastic fibres, particularly as governments, brands and consumers all seek to make more sustainable textile choices.