How does my clothes dryer’s lint catcher get so full, yet my clothes don’t fall apart? Where does all this lint come from?
In: Chemistry
Ah, but the clothes do fall apart; it just takes a lot of washings. Ever notice how old t-shirts become threadbare? That’s not so much from wearing them, but from the repeated washings. Your washing machine slowly converts your t-shirts to lint.
They do fall apart, eventually. If you keep your clothes for long enough, they get thin and wear out even if you avoid damaging them.
On top of the comments I’m seeing here, your clothes pick up bits of chaff, linen, and fiber that aren’t part of them : pet hair, your hair, carpet fiber, lint from this like scarves and hats in the winter that comes off even between washings, bits of fiber in the dust around us, etc. So not 100% of what accumulates in the lint filter is your clothes wearing away.
(Probably skin cells, too.)
A lot of what you see there is cotton. Most fabrics will generate some lint, but cotton makes a lot. When it is washed, the fibers tend to swell up. When you run the item through the dryer, especially with other cotton things, those swollen fibers rub up against each other and scrape off bits of the material. The stuff that gets scraped off is lint.
Among other things, this can make the clothes feel rougher. That’s why we use fabric softener, it coats those fibers, lubricating them in a way. The coating flakes off in the dryer instead of the fibers themselves, so they are softer and last longer. Ever notice how when you use too much softener, the fabric feels kind of odd and waxy? That’s why.
The fact that a lot of lint is cotton is one big reason to make sure you clear your lint trap regularly and that your vents are clear. When cotton reaches a certain surface temperature, it begins to decompose, and decomposing cotton actually generates MORE heat! Now imagine a wad of tightly packed cotton, already hot from the dryer, decomposing and generating MORE heat, with nowhere for that heat to go. The temperature of that wad rises until it reaches what is called the *critical surface temperature* – at which point it ignites!
A lot of it’s hair too. if you have pets, there will be a ton of hair in the lint. If you have long hair, same thing.
Are you also considering all the dead skin cells that slough off into your clothes?
As another aside… a lot of lint gets flushed out in the wash (but is not a fire/“dust” hazard like your dryer lint) and is so small it doesn’t get filtered out.
Significant quantities eventually end up in our waterways and synthetic fabrics (nylon, rayon, polyester…) are one source of the plastic microfibers being found in the ocean. (It ain’t the bags and straws.)
It’s little fibers breaking off of the threads your clothes are made up of. Slowly, over time with many dryer cycles, the clothes will give up most of the fibers they had, and this is when you start developing “ratty” clothing with holes in it, even though you never put enough stress on the clothes to rip them.
The lint, while still in the clothing is significantly more compact than how you’re seeing it in your lint catcher.
So your lint catcher while looking like a lot of fibres is actually mostly just air in between all the lint. If you compacted it down to how it is in your clothing, it would be a very small amount.
As you wash items, they lose particles (lint) which is collected in your lint trap. If you weigh the lint you’ll see that it is a small percentage of the (dry) washed items.
As an interesting aside – laundry and linen companies (e.g., Aramark) often have a weight cut off for when they inject new linen. For example, if Aramark provides uniforms and the dry uniform loses 25% of its weight or more, it is retired from circulation.
Edit: Injection is a term used in laundry & linen to mean a new item is put in (“injected”) to circulation. When an item is retired – which can be due to weight, but could be caused by any other number of issues like rips, tares, stains – they are no longer in circulation, which means they won’t be cleaned and supplies back to the client. Syringes and other injection devices are not involved in laundry injection.
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