James Greiff , Columnist

Clean the Fleece, Dirty the Planet

Washing releases plastic fibers. They're carried out to sea. Clams eat them. And so on.

October 20, 2015 at 2:00 PM UTC

James Greiff is an editor for Bloomberg Opinion. He was Wall Street news team leader at Bloomberg News and senior editor for Bloomberg Markets magazine. He previously reported on banking for the St. Petersburg Times and the Charlotte Observer.

Green, not clean.
Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg

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It’s getting cold. Time to break out the fleece. Warm and light, it even comes in a nice shade of green: a lot of the material used to make fleece comes from recycled plastic bottles -- better in your sweater than in a landfill.

Green that is, until you run it through the washing machine. That’s when thousands of plastic microfibers get flushed into the sewer system and on to some stream, lake, river and ocean.