Washing synthetic textiles releases large amounts of microplastics into the environment every day worldwide. This is why France is introducing mandatory microplastic filters for new washing machines beginning in 2025. But just how effective are such filters? And is this the most effective approach moving forwards? This blog post covers how microplastics are formed during washing, which factors influence their formation, the reduction and prevention strategies which currently exist, and potential solutions.

Wastewater treatment plants are important point sources of microplastics and micropollutants into the environment. Many wastewater treatment plants will be required to upgrade their facilities with an advanced treatment step to remove micropollutants, but these processes do not target microplastic removal. We therefore investigated the ability of two advanced treatment methods and our novel Wasser 3.0 PE-X® process to remove microplastics at the wastewater treatment plant in Landau, Germany. Read more about the key finding of our study, which was recently published open access in MDPI Water.