if lint is just fibers from my clothes being pulled out in the dryer, why are my clothes not completely dissolved after decades of being put through said dryer?
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The quick answer is that they do – the older and more used clothes get, the thinner and more worn they appear. Eventually starting to fail and having holes form in them.
As we wear them they get bashed about and rubbed against things, and the fibres that make them up will slowly separate and fall away as lint – normally this just blows away into the atmosphere and we only notice it as dust, but in a dryer this is concentrated and caught by a filter so we can see it accumulating more easily.
The trick is that clothes only normally lose a very tiny amount of fibres at a time, and the lint you find in the lint trap is the lint from many pieces of clothing, and often multiple loads of washing through the dryer, so it only adds up to a tiny loss per piece of clothing, per load. It also isn’t even – new clothes will typically lose a lot of fibres initially, but will settle down and lose a lot less per wash once they have been washed and worn a few times (which is why new clothes always seem softer and more cosy than well worn clothes).
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