Somewhere in the late 90s, I worked on the IETF IP over TV broadcast. I mostly observed and tried to ask smart questions, but it was really fun to be a part of the group. I learned a lot about both the technical side of radio frequencies, how to contribute to a group when I only had one area of expertise (TCP/IP) of many required for success, and how to manage and be managed remotely by a decntralized group. To this day I use AM for pushing packets around the property. There's no doubt standard radio broadcasters are an awesome way to pick up where the usual networks fall down.
When we lost power for 10 days a few winters back we attempted to use the fire place for heat. It was a fail. Post and beam house (large wide open floor plan) with a large transfer from 1st to 2nd floor, and apprently my lack of skill for optimizing heat over beauty in the fireplace, left us without much of a thermal bump. To this day I swear we were pulling heat out of the chimney faster than we were heating the house; I cooled the house with fire.
An open fire is not a particularly warm thing to have unless you’re directly in front of it. Most of the heat goes straight up the flue, and it uses an enormous amount of air to keep burning - it will pull huge volumes from rvertwhere it can. This is why these old buildings didn’t suffer from damp issues - the open fires burning were ventilating them.
It's the same problem as those portable AC units: the exhaust (chimney in this case) draws large amounts of air in from outside which is at the wrong temperature (cold in this case).
If it has a flue or chimney, it isnt really an open fire. Look at an ancient long house, or farmer's thatched cottage from say 400 years ago. They had a fire on a stone circle on the floor in the middle of the room, and a high roof sometimes with a hole but often not. It was smoky, but kept everyone warm.
I think before heating without smoke, it was perfectly sensible to smoke tobacco because it was the least bad thing you were inhaling on a daily basis, and you were likely going to die of lung cancer regardless. Makes sense we didn’t really discover the risk until after we stopped using wood burning stoves (or burning coal, like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s mother would to in Little House when it was available)
Sorry, it’s not a topic I know an awful lot about. I was talking about an exposed hearth with a chimney like in the article, as opposed to a cast iron unit that recirculates the air like a stove
There have been times, with various crises, where I only half considered if indoor plumbing was such a great thing. But that's probably a very old-fashioned New England thing.
Yeah, if you actually want to heat the house with fire you’ll want an insert or a wood stove. Otherwise most fireplaces in most houses are decorative, and one pays for that decoration with heat loss.
And even those will require draft from outside the insert / stove, so either you build them with an inlet from outside, you pull cold air from badly sealed doors / windows, or the chimney draft will be insufficient.
They will require breathing but much less than an open fireplace and a lot more of the heat will be kept inside and not sent through the chimney. So overall they’re way on the positive side. If you can get a cold air inlet it’s better, but it’s far from necessary.
As a kid I lived in homes with both - and a home with a barrel stove - and as an adult with a pellet stove and I don’t remember that being a problem. Net, it was fine?
That’s not uncommon, but having grown up in a house heated by wood fires I knew that when building our current house. The main fireplace is on a central wall and has enormous thermal mass. Beauty and utility can be combined.
My grandparents' house was this way - the chimney was in the center of the house (built sometime in the late 1800s and rebuilt in the 1950s).
The fireplace had a stone chimney - and the kitchen was built in an 'L' shape around the first floor of the fireplace. The (master) bedroom (an additional bedroom was built in the 1950s), the stone of the chimney was a good quarter of one of the walls.
I do, however, think that the rough hewn stone and mortar of the chimney with the insets around it had a certain rustic beauty... aside from the "that got warm" in the winter and could keep the kitchen, living room, and bedroom warm.
To use it effectively you want one with water jacket and just use that hot water with your normal house heating system. You don't need much power to run circulation pump so UPS + some solar panels should be enough even in deep winter. There are also systems that get it out of the exhaust but that doesn't get you much heat storage, just instant heat and generally less efficient.
Old school version of that were masonry stoves that come with ton+ of mass for the bricks and smoke being routed all over (often including a place to sleep) to take as much heat as possible from it.
If I had money for that I'd put a big hot water tank for buffer, heat it normally with heat pump, and just had emergency water-sheathed fireplate, with big buffer you can just fire it up once and have tank slowly give the heat back to the building. Or fire it up at the coldest days to save some heat pump power in days where there is barely any solar.
I know someone who gets through the winter off their fireplace. Really old timber house with riverrock chimney. Their fireplace looks nothing like what you think of a fire place looking. You can’t see the fire, there is like this big iron door in front of it. They go through a huge pile of wood every winter, along with a couple electric heaters for rooms or office.
I assume most decorative fireplaces on the other hand are not built to heat the house.
There are a bunch of these on our island. The fireplaces are in the middle of the house, small doors, and once they get that brick warm the houses are 80 all winter long. They were built by Russian families in the 1940s, maybe a couple dozen homes on about 300 acres. The rest of the home's construction was typical; except for a few innovative walkways between main house and garage. I'm guessing it's what they knew from their homeland, even though temperatures here rarely drop below 20, and then, only for a short time.
Yeah fireplaces don’t make sense to me. Hot air rises and it sucks the existing heated air in the house which all flows out. The only way to heat the space is you need something with a lot of thermal mass that heats up in the process and then radiates heat. So a lot of bricks around the fire, some sort of baffle to enable the heat transfer and a system that sucks in air from the outside.
We saw stoves/fireplaces like this in a bunch of taverns in Slovenia. Huge hulking tiled cubes around the center of the building that just radiated a pleasant heat from every square inch of the surface. I imagine it was quite efficient, with just a very low fire burning to keep it in equilibrium.
If it was a rocket stove, it was a very small very hot fire. I've had a bit of a love affair with rocket stoves lately (even replaced my BBQ/grill with one).
I like the idea of an outside vent, and unfortunately, I think an insert of some kind. I can't help but first think of the goofy look of a wood fired stove sitting half in and half out of the fireplace. Surrounded by a few tons of river rock. That said, after a couple days of a couple degrees, it's either that or the tent in the basement.
Did you use a fire grate with a big space underneath and keep it swept clean? Or did you build up a big bed of ash under the grate? On the advice of a chimney sweep I put a perimeter of bricks under the grate to form walls and we're currently filling it with more and more ash (it really takes a while). It's starting to make a difference in how much heat comes back into the room. Without that void underneath, the fire doesn't burn so hot and cold air doesn't get pulled through so quickly.
(It feels like it's getting warmer - may all be wishful thinking though, I haven't taken any measurements!)
the fresh air inlet should be piped along the chimney walls, this would also recover the condensation heat of the water produced during combustion, but its not trivial to design while keeping in mind things like maintenance, different chimney column temperature (and thus different convective forces), capturing and effluence of the condensed water, ... the heated fresh air should not directly go to the fire but piped into the room.
Neuromodulation tools and systems that allow for a user to reverse normal reaction to stimuli is going to be a huge market soon. When I erg and just stare at the stats on the computer or phone, I struggle. In a good and not so good way. But when I put John Wick or Speed Racer (the movie) on a screen and pump up the volume, I can erg WAY past my normal break point. It's hard to stop, rather than hard to keep going. The new tools coming soon for focus, work, pain, and more.
I've been restoring my old daily driver, a 1985 Mercedes 300TD (the model has appeared in over 1000 films) for the past year. It's a funny questions to ask what is fully restored, is it all original, or OEM. One day I'm flexible about a piece of plate steel used for the fuel pedal mounting bracket and then the next day I'm feeling like a fraud for replacing the floor mats with after market. Either way, it's a rewarding process to bring anything back to a useful state. My Fixit shelf in the basement is a huge draw for my free time.
Since it's a societal problem, but solved on the microlevel of one person at a time, it seems the way to have a broader effect is to show the value of having connection with other people over the value of not.
Overcome any addictions (scrolling, gaming, etc.) that stand in the way would be easier if the goal was clear.
Overcoming attitudes and defensive beliefs (too many cliques, they won't talk to me...) go away when you can either recall a time when you had friends or know others who do.
Convince people it's better (in their own value system) to be social, have friends of all kinds, and let them know their value and meaning increase by being a friend, I think you'd have a hard time stopping people from becoming social.
I have to replicate the little shoes on the cassette mechanics of a Becker Grand Prix car stereo from 1985. The plastic shoes are brittle from age, heat, and wear. I've spent the last couple weeks finding about two dozen ways that almost work. Their tiny and need to fit on three even tinier feet that ride rails for loading the cassette. This morning, I found out that I can probably make several possible plans work - good enough. Which is to say, I found out I was delaying the project with hopes for the perfect solution when good enough was already there.
I'm down to just a few sweat shirts and over shirts from the 80s, but they are hanging in there. Both the colors and the fabric. When the subject comes up with friends who ask about a particular shirt I joke, "The cotton was tougher back then". Recently, I've had jeans, shirts, and even socks that didn't make it through a single summer.
Is anyone else freaked out about cleaning their dryer's lint filter given all the new fabric materials? I'm putting together a dryer-vac system to keep it from billowing into the air of our small laundry room.
I can confirm that you really don't want to breathe in any of that crap.
A year and a half ago I developed symptoms of what was some form of bronchitis. Lots of mucus, constantly coughing, etc. I was pretty freaking sick. I tend to wait some things like this out, but it wasn't going away so I went to a doctor and got some medications including albuterol and some kind of steroid (prednisone, I think). It got a little more manageable, but didn't seem to be getting any better.
One day, I realized how much of a dumbass I was the whole time.
The apartment I was living in had a laundry room, but it was tiny and I got tired of both hauling laundry up and down multiple flights of stairs and having to fight for time with the few machines that were there. I bought a small washer and dryer pair from Black & Decker which were designed for apartment living. Kinda off topic, but there were no hookups in my unit, so I had to jerryrig a water connection using some collapsible garden hoses that connected to my shower and its drain. Was kinda hilarious but worked great.
I made the mistake of thinking that I could just allow the dryer to blow through two sets of lint traps and have a fan blow air out of the window to manage moisture and remaining lint making it through. What I didn't realize was how inadequate the traps were. Because I worked from home, I spent a lot of time in that bedroom, including when the dryer was running. I was breathing in all sorts of stuff without knowing it.
Once I stopped hanging out in that room while the dryer was running, bought an air purifier, and made sure to frequently clean my apartment of dust, my symptoms rapidly started to go away.
If I had to do all of that again, and I couldn't just have the dryer blow directly out the window, I would find some way to have it do a second pass through a HEPA filter, perhaps after drying the air with something like calcium chloride.
I shudder to think of all the microplastic fibers that remain somewhere in my body.
We have a washing machine that also has a drier function. It dries much slower than a standalone drier as it consumes water during the drying circle to cool and condense the hot air from the clothes. But the big plus is that it works in mostly closed cycle reusing the air. And there is no need to clean the filter, just unclog the sink pipes once in few months.
Heat pump dryer. Basically, an HVAC system but instead of pumping the heat from your house outside, it pumps it into your clothes. Slower than an old-style dryer but way more efficient.
Also definitely look into ventless dryers - while not as quick as a vented one, the heat pump versions have come a long way from the classic condenser styles of the past.
Our ventless dryer is great. Maybe it takes 50% longer, but we're not running multiple loads a day so who cares? Smaller to medium sized electric ventless dryers are the most efficient dryers out there. (Of course we also just use clothes racks to dry stuff.)
I got a drying closet. It's basically a heater in a tent with a few vents. It takes almost twice as long as a similarly sized tumble-drying machine, but absolutely nothing but warm, moist air is exhausted into the room. I even use it to supplement a space heater.
I'd be interested to know why buying, installing, jerryrigging, and (presumably every time you did a load of laundry) hooking and unhooking collapsible hosing for a washer and dryer in a bedroom you worked from, was in any way more convenient or cheaper or useful than just using the communal laundry room or a dedicated laundry service?
Don't forget "almost dying from toxic air pollution" too
I was in a similar situation and my solution was to just buy enough clothes and not get them dirty when wearing so that it would last me about 2 months between having to do laundry. But I didn't have communal laundry, I had to drive across town to a public laundry.
There's still good fabrics out there you just have to pay for them. I've mostly replaced my wardrobe now with natural undyed cottons and wools from the likes of "unbleached apparel" and "industry of all nations". There is cotton grown in new mexico, socks spun in north carolina. "Filson" makes a few things in Seattle. Don't skip the stuff made in Peru or India neither.
- American Giant is pretty good for their pullover hoodies. They'll wear out at the cuffs first, but I've kept a single hoody in use for like five years with some repair stitching.
- Standard Issue makes good waffle knit shirts. They'll last a few years depending on how often you wash them.
- Duluth Trading makes some good cotton shirts and boxers. Quality has declined slightly, but they're the best plain cotton shirts and boxers I've found so far.
- Big John makes denim jeans on old Levi looms. They even use cotton stitching.
- Carhartt makes some okay dressy dungarees. Their work pants are worthless these days though (in my experience). They've been pivoting to lifestyle for a few years now.
- Filson in my opinion has declined, but they're still pretty good. The socks are great, but they're overpriced.
(Only posting this because I've struggled finding decent clothes myself and it's hard to tell what's good when you're shopping online)
I am stunned by DT's longevity. I'm finally starting to wear thin the back of the ankle/heel from shoe friction in one set, after about 6 years, with a total of about 8pr socks in rotation. Including about 15,000mi of use cycling.
> Carhartt makes some okay dressy dungarees. Their work pants are worthless these days though (in my experience). They've been pivoting to lifestyle for a few years now.
Carhartt are the most durable clothes I own. Whatever Levi’s did, their jeans went from lasting years to literal months before they would rip. Had the same 3 pairs of Carhartt work pants for half a decade with no end in sight.
Maybe something changed between 2020 and 2025, shrug
>Whatever Levi’s did, their jeans went from lasting years to literal months before they would rip.
Before they went public, the trick with Levi's was to basically shop with two things in mind: price point, and finish. I personally stick to non-stretch 501s. If you were sorting price low to high, you were buying low quality 501s. If you sorted price high to low, there were a bunch of "fashion" 501s at the top of the list, but when you got a pair of expensive 501s in "rigid" or some other simple wash, that was where the quality was. They used to publish the weight of the denim on the product detail page. Bonus points if they're Shrink to Fit.
Pre-IPO they'd also do much more experimentation. I have a pair of 501s made of Dyneema that I have been abusing for about a decade, and only just this month has one pocket needed to be repaired. I wish I'd bought multiple of these, but I got it on a blowout sale.
Post-IPO, there was more branding hierarchy: Levi's Vintage Clothing, Made & Crafted, Premium, and then everything else.
It looks like it's a little different now, but I haven't had to buy a new pair of 501s in several years. There are still quality jeans to be had from Levi's, but you have to spend more and avoid gimmicks.
I used to swear by them but I ordered like half a dozen pairs of their standard double fronted work dungs and they fell apart in the washer after 2-3 cycles. This was 2022-2023. It was weird, seams weren't stitched properly, the fabric was lighter, etc. I saw comments on their site which shared my experience.
I think this around the time they shifted production outside the USA (memory is hazy). If you see a "helmets to hardhats" decal on the inside of your pants on the pocket lining, they're US production.
I've switched to Bailey's "Wild Ass" brand of denim work pants for my physical laboring needs, but you have to wear them with logging suspenders.
Good to know, I might give them a shot again. For Wild Ass, I'd go up probably two-four sizes from your Carhartts. If you're a 32 in Carhartt you'll want at least a 34 in WA. Go for 36 if the Carhartts are snug. WA will shrink slightly too.
Levis stuff has been made overseas for decades now. It's only with the more recent shift towards using cotton blends in nearly of their jeans that the longevity has suffered.
The Levis's brand doesn't mean much anymore. They sell the same style (model number) of jeans at completely different price points for different stores at varying levels of quality.
You can buy Levi's at $30 at Walmart, $40 at Costco, $80 at a Levi's store, or $100 at Nordstrom.
How Levi's Sells the Same Jeans at Different Prices | Levi's 505 Teardown | Industry Secrets
I can’t believe I’m chiming in on HN about work pants…
The B01 are the only pants still Union made in the USA. AFAIK they still are durable as hell, I’m wearing them now.
The rest (mostly stretchy but some normal ‘washed’ duck) are imported and the quality is traded for fashion/lifestyle
Rather than focus on brand, I'd recommend developing a better eye and learning how to identify durable, high quality fabrics.
While looking at the brand might be a good heuristic to rely on in the short term, the temptation is too high for vendors to take advantage of their brand power to offload cheaper fabrics for higher margins, I'm looking at you H&M and UNIQLO ...
Along these lines, watch these two videos from Bernadette Banner to learn how to identify fabric types and learn how to identify quality features in clothing:
H&M is awful, but Uniqlo has some great products that will last. I’m a big fan of a few of their t-shirts, especially the heavy cotton tees. You really gotta get your hands on each product to know what’s worth the money though.
Uniqlo does still have some gems, but it's been rapidly enshittifying. My uniqlo clothes from 2019 are incomparable to what they have today. Some of their stuff is still good, but it's a game of roulette every time, because they'll replace products with very similarly branded new versions that suck.
This matches my experience. 2019 was about the last time you could walk into a Uniqlo, grab an item at random and walk out with something reasonable. Just after that we had Covid and the everything bubble which broke a lot of companies. Uniqlo was one of the casualties.
They either had to dramatically increase the price or lower the quality of their stock. It is pretty obvious which choice they made. You get what you pay for.
At least in Australia I haven't had an issue with anything from Uniqlo. Their shirts have lasted longer than almost all the other stores I've bought from.
They do have some polyester crap, but they are better than most at having 100% cotton options.
It's even more complicated. Many brands don't manufacture their own products. Or only manufacture some of them. They license to many manufacturers, typically. The same manufacturer may make the same or similar products for multiple brands too, even further complicating things.
As you've said, you really can't judge by the brand.
And this where the (independent!) physical store shines. I wish we had more discerning tradesmen these days. Something important went with the brick and mortar stores.
Some of these exist now in the form of (maybe) physical store (or online-only) plus youtube personality, of course.
I went through an Uniqlo last month and was very disappointed at how just about every sort of basic article of clothing I was looking for was at least 30% polyester. Polyester has its place, the fact its not breathable and cheap does make it genuinely useful in moderation to help warm certain articles, but I don't want it in every single basic t shirt and pair of pants.
You can still get high quality or at the very least 100% Cotton clothes there but you'll have to seek them out and they know people will pay a premium for them so they tend to be 2x or more the price of the popular Airism t shirts for example.
I did give up entirely on trying to find outerwear there that was at least roughly >80% organic materials like cotton or wool which was probably my biggest disappointment. You can find nice basics with good quality fabrics at many brands. But Uniqlo 10 years ago was my favorite for wintertime because they're one of the few that had affordable coats and outerwear that made use of real wool + down with good quality lining, excellent heat-tech jackets that used a great blend of breathable fabric + artificial ones to keep you warm but not sweating. I've worn an Uniqlo duffel coat, peacoat, and several jackets every year for the better part of a decade and they still hold up excellent besides some pilling on the coats that I haven't fixed yet.
They don't even really seem to carry proper coats anymore in their stores nor decent jackets, everything seems like the cheap polyester fleeces and puffer coats that everyone else has.
I had a fascination with 100% cotton clothing about ten years ago. These days I don’t. I’m working out a lot more and I care more about quick-drying and moisture-wicking fabrics. I suppose I’m a victim of the athleisure trend where athletic wear becomes everyday wear.
I sweat a lot and as a result try to avoid cotton for the most part. Wool is just a far better material in my experience, and doesn’t hold odor like cotton.
Cotton _is_ more expensive than polyester, just as a raw material. That's pretty much the whole reason they put it in clothes. So the fact that 100% cotton is more expensive than a cotton poly blend is not surprising or unreasonable.
Outside of what has been mentioned here (thanks folks for some new brands) I've found clusters in Canada and Portugal of great clothing brands making quality products with good materials:
I also like this site No Man Walks Alone to find quality brands. It is about learning how to spot quality though in stitching and fabrics. Wish there was more educational materials out there on this.
A shop like http://blueowl.us (slightly more focused on jeans) or https://witheredfig.com both will give you lots of ideas of great brands. They’re both basically anti fast fashion. Recommend order from them directly, but worst case give some ideas. I invested in high quality tee shirts and pants and have been wearing them for almost a decade.
Outdoor brands (Patagonia, Outdoor Research, Fjällräven, etc.) surprisingly have some high quality items, especially when it comes to trousers and t-shirts. There will be limited choices but I've found that my purchases from those brands have lasted way longer and took more abuse than your regular retailer products do/did.
Snow Peak has high quality clothing that isn't absurdly expensive. It's very nice and fits well. If you want something higher end I also like Norse Projects. If you want lower end look at Champion - specifically Reverse Weave.
my own recommendation is spend some money, and look at tags.
I shop at JCrew and higher end fashion companies, but still check material and care labels.
You are actually seeing something the linked article doesn't even mention: fiber length.
Not all cotton is created equally. "Egyptian cotton" was long prized because of the long fiber lengths. Cotton fibers are very smooth and slick, and only stay together in thread because of friction along their length as they lay with neighbor fibers (often twisted, where friction becomes exponential instead of linear). Short-fiber cotton is cheaper and easier to source; ergo, cheaper clothing tends to be made of it. Short fibers are also much more likely to slip within the thread under heat, lubrication, and motion (washing and drying). Obviously, they are also more likely to completely fall out of the thread, creating lint.
This is really only true for cotton and very similar fibers. Linen fibers are generally all multiple inches long, so there's less of a quality issue (they are made from rotting away everything but the longitudinal support fibers of the plant stalks).
Wool varies greatly in surface texture, especially after modern chemical processing, and fiber length isn't an issue because the fibers are also inch-long or better. It shrinks, however, because its friction is SO HIGH that it won't give up (stretch back) once it gets bound up.
Silk fibers super slick, but are several yards/meters long; a single cocoon is made from a single thread. They are much slicker than cotton (and therefore harder to hand-spin), but by the time they are made into thread they have plenty of surface friction maintaining their position in the thread.
Artificial fibers are as long as the production shift lasts, so effectively infinite.
Unfortunately about linen, they often "cottonize" it to use on cotton machines. They just chop that long fiber into short ones, negating much of the benefit. I haven't figured out how to tell the difference.
I don't have any clothes as old as yours though for sure, but line drying generally helps your clothes last longer. I'm so glad I live in Colorado. It's a warm winter, but it takes like 3 hours to dry stuff on the line (especially synthetics). Of course that means all my synthetic fibers are literally billowing into the air I guess. Still, we've been going without a dryer for about five years now and I've had no regrets.
My strategy forever is to wash all my shirts, put them in the dryer on low for 5 minutes, then hang them all up in a doorway overnight. My clothes last much longer this way and never get wrinkled.
Indoor air during wintertime tends to be low humidity in many places, with most residences running humidifiers to reach a comfortable (~35% RH) level. Clothes-drying will both benefit from the first and assist in the latter.
(California is a notable exception.)
In places which are humid during winter-time, cracking a few windows open will allow for equalisation with the outside, again keeping indoor humidity reasonable.
I had a european friend introduce me to indoor drying racks, and since, anything I plan to keep long term, I hang dry as well. I've found my clothes last longer and look nicer. Only thing I've found doesn't work well are towels.
I got a Foxydry (Italy) wall-mounted rack a few years back, best €100 I spent that year.
Bottom rack folds up flush to the wall, top rack raises nearly to the ceiling. Towels dry fine spread over extra bar or three to allow for better air circulation.
I use my line in Texas, and 3 hours would see the clothes go from wet -> dry -> melted! And that's in the shade!
Unfortunately, the line dried clothes are not soft, so I end up fluffing them in the drier using the air dry setting. Still cheaper than running the heating element, but hasn't eliminated the drier for me.
Why? Polyester (as one plastic based fiber) gets a lot of flack because low quality clothes tend to use it, but polyester can be a fantastic fabric if done right. Durable, fast drying, and can be completely recycled.
For example, Patagonia tends to have high quality polyesters and has since the 70s. My experience with their fleece is that I can abuse it and it'll come out unaffected on the other end. Pilling now and then that I take down with a pill remover.
Nylon is also a fantastic material, when used appropriately, like for the shell of a jacket.
And don't get me wrong, cotton, wool, and hemp are all fantastic as well. Most of my clothing is those fabrics and they do a damn fine job at what they're good at.
"Polyesters" is a huge category. PET in plastic bottles is also a polyester, and it can persist for hundreds of years because it's typically in a highly crystalline form that resists fragmentation.
I was talking about polyester fibers. They have multiple orders of magnitude higher surface-area-to-weight ratio.
There are very few good studies of the degradation rate, and they typically focus on bulk products rather than particulates. So we have to rely on indirect evidence, the concentration of nanoplastics near polluted locations typically stays steady rather than keeps increasing. It means that it's in a dynamic equilibrium.
Another data point is lignin. It's a bilogical polymer, but that is not biodegradable in bulk, unless you are a fungus. And fungi don't have some neat enzymes that can degrade it, they just blast it with peroxides. And yes, there are lignin nanoparticles and you can detect them in water. These nanoparticles also don't accumulate and they can be degraded by bacteria because of their high surface area. Even though bacteria can NOT degrade bulk lignin.
Pro tip: if your clothes say 100% merino wool or whatever, this is only about the fiber, and they may still be covered in plastic from the "superwash" process (for example, almost all merino wool is)
Oh, so that's why my fancy 100% Merino wool sweaters don't stink like wet dog when wet, like regular vintage wool sweaters? I know there had to something different in the manufacturing process.
I once bought 100% hemp pants because I heard that material is tougher than cotton, but my bicycle seat killed the pants in just a few weeks. Modern jeans last a few months to a year. I have yet to find pants that endure a bicycle commute.
Had my Nudie jeans for about 5 year wearing them probably 4 days a week averaged over the whole time. Indeed the frequent cycling killed them, but it took quite a while. Now I'm figuring out when to bring them to their free repair service to see if I can get a prolonged live for them.
Disclaimer: cycled probably only 15 minutes a day with them averaged over the whole time, but really hard to say, so your millage might vary
Hemp fibers are tougher then cotton
Ironically, that's why hemp is comonnly used to make thinner more airy and less heavy fabrics. So the final products aren't always more resistant to wear and tear just because fibers are
I tried that but quickly found out that a bit of polyester makes clothes MUCH more durable. It doesn't matter for bath robes, but underwear or socks with just 5% of polyester last almost 10x longer.
I’ve been going the same direction lately. We have enough plastic in our environment, the last thing I need is to be wearing it. It’s probably a bit paranoid just from a health perspective, but I’ve found that I genuinely prefer the feel/look of natural fibers.
> Is anyone else freaked out about cleaning their dryer's lint filter given all the new fabric materials?
I used to be. So I spent quite a lot of time researching the issue. Not just google searches, but actually speaking with biologists.
I think that the current microplastic scare is overblown. The "credit card worth of plastic in brain" articles are just ridiculous. Biologically, the body has defenses against microscopic contaminants in blood. There are special immune cells that "eat" insoluble particles and then get excreted (typically in bile).
Nearly every environment-adjacent field has concern nannies who make unrealistic risk assessments which then get regurgitated into guilt-inspiring newspaper articles. This is especially common when there is no way to determine for certain what the actual risk is; some folks fall on the "allow zero risk" side.
Some concern is warranted. I think that plasticizer or dyes leaching from plastics is a very real problem, so I try to avoid food stored in plastic containers (this includes tin cans, they are often lined with plastic).
This is a solvable problem, though. Polyethylene doesn't need plasticizers.
I just try to buy natural or the semi-synthetic cellulose fabrics, there's quite a variety.
Natural fabrics are cotton, silk, wool and linen of course, but the semi-synthetic fabrics like the rayons (viscose, modal, "bamboo", Tencel, Lyocell, Bemberg, and some sorts of artificial silk) are wood cellulose chemically rearranged so they're just cellulose when they reach you.
The fabric referred to as Acetate is cellulose acetate, so not pure cellulose like cotton and rayon but is just as biodegradable and contains no petroleum plastics.
Of course the production process for viscose rayons (not Tencel/Lyocell/Modal - those use a different process) isn't great. It uses carbon disulfide which is a neurotoxin. However it's not a persistent pollutant. Modern factories in the west try to capture and recycle as much carbon disulfide as possible (it's released from the rayon during processing and can be fed back in to the process) but as a lot of factories are in countries with poor controls on this it's hard to tell how many are doing this.
ive recently found some rayon shirts I really like, but how do you wash them without destroying them? everything I've read online says dry cleaning is the only way
For viscose most rayon a gentle cycle in a front loading washing machine is generally fine, though the more silk-like variants are less resilient. You might want to put it in a garment washing bag to make sure it doesn't get stretched while wet. If you don't have that it's dry-clean only.
Varieties like modal and Lyocell are machine washable.
Yeah, I've started being a bit concerned about inhaling all the tiny plastic fibers every time I clean the filters and wondering what could be doing to my lunges.
In New Zealand, culturally people generally use dryers only when it is too wet to hang them outside. Dryers are seen as wasteful and destructive. T-shirts last longer but they do not last forever. Quality has gone down substantially.
Yes completely agree. I always hang up my washing (also in NZ, don't have a dryer) and was recently sorting through my tshirts as we are moving country. I have one t-shirt that is nearly 20 years old and still holds its shape (though the color and print has faded) on the other hand i threw away a bunch of other t shirts which were just over a year old because they developed holes and particularly the collar is completely broken. Funnily their color and print is mostly fine.
I don't think brand is a good predictor either, e.g. the old t shirt is from threadless IIRC while I had many other threadless tshirts which didn't last near as long.
But I have 90s t-shirts that are just now dying after all these years of being dried only in an electric dryer, and other t-shirts just a few years old that are disintegrating. There's definitely been a quality change in the average shirt.
Inflation halved the value of money since the 90s. If you haven't been paying double for your shirts then the quality hasn't changed but your price expectations subtly did.
We see this everywhere. Manufacturers moving to more disposable products to keep the average prices within consumer expectations. Shirts and Cars certainly ain't "what they used to be."
Cotton shirts aren't valuable enough to treat this gingerly. I hang dry my merino, but it's easier to just buy new cotton shirts every five years or so. That's a good run for clothing.
My following comment is not about clothes, but not long ago I washed some curtains that were hanging in a window for some fifteen years. The amount of lint that came out in the dryer was incredible. I'm talking inch-thick wad on the filter screen, growing another inch with continued drying, after being removed.
It was probably due to years of UV breakdown of the fibers from daylight.
The lint had a very homogeneous consistency: it was almost snow white with few inclusions deviating from that, almost resembling polyester pillow stuffing in some regards, except for having a different structure (much shorter fiber strands, probably).
I wonder what impact those plastic bits used to attach tags to clothing have on durability. Woven/knit products kind of have a countdown that starts when threads break, and those tags tend to mean your clothing already has broken threads right from the store.
I hold my breath when I clean the lint trap, replace it and start the drier, then leave the laundry room and take a breath. I’m still probably inhaling some fibers but it makes me feel like I’m doing something.
Probably be easier to just where an N95 (or even a cloth mask, these aren't really small particles) when changing the lint trap, to the extent this is a concern.
That was me - until today. Now I've got a newish Dyson that was annoying to use on floors stashed under the water heater with a sneaky hose extension that flips up to deal with lint without even removing the filter all the way. It has a good filter on it and the container should hold months of lint.
Next question...how do I empty the Dyson container. Ha!
Just throwing a HELL YES <with a kung fu punch> out there for this. Nice work. I've been trying to integrate a live ascii video feature for a while now and the subtle detail on this is really inspiring.
Author here. Thanks so much for the rad reply and enthusiasm! So glad I could help inspire you, and please feel free to use this for any art you make, just tag me on socials or send it my way so I can check it out.
I've just started a Salvage Pile in my workshop. Laser printer with fax modem was the first for excision and harvest. I could feel the addiction take hold before the last of the plastic shell was tossed into the refuse bin. The stepper motors alone!
I have a huge old microwave on the blocks next. After that a series of small odd ball electronic toys and a few early LED bulbs. If I ever come across a vape, I'm sure it'll make its way on to the shelf.
With regards to the microwave, here’s a token “please safely discharge and double check the cap” comment!
With regards to vapes, just look on the ground near a sidewalk. I find like 3 or 4 big depleted vapes a day in a US urban area. Closer to 15 or 20 in greater London in the UK.
As a second regards the microwave, depending on the age, please be extremely careful about the magnetron the insulators on which could contain beryllium oxide, which can kill you.
There are a lot of fun parts inside microwaves (a personal favorite is the high-torque-low-speed-line-voltage motor, which I use to make creepy Halloween decorations) but the caps, transformer, and magnetron are all useful for somewhat... more dangerous... pursuits.
the insulators on which could contain beryllium oxide
As far as I can tell, this is an urban legend. No consumer microwave oven has ever used beryllium in its magnetron insulators. Military radar ones, yes (and likely where the legend started.) Some specialist test equipment and RF transmitters too, and they all contain prominent warnings of it. Besides its toxicity, it's far more expensive than regular alumina.
That's my understanding as well, but I still wouldn't disassemble a 1960s microwave without protection (I have assisted in the dismantling of a couple microwave communications devices which did contain BeO and were also very well-labeled as such). Anything from the 80s on at least is almost certainly aluminum.
Sort of. "Single use disposables" were banned, but the companies switched immediately to a two-part unit which, AFAICT, is still used and thrown away in exactly the same fashion.
Sample size of 1, but I have a friend who does buy the refills and charges the original unit. Every shop that sells the combination units also seems to sell the refills (at least around here).
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