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.
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.
- 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)
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
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.
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
It's my understanding that this is the case. I could be wrong; I hope to be.
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 ...
They do have some polyester crap, but they are better than most at having 100% cotton options.
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.
Some of these exist now in the form of (maybe) physical store (or online-only) plus youtube personality, of course.
As you've said, you really can't judge by the brand.
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.
Canada - Anian (https://anianmfg.com/) for wool products. - Reigning Champ (https://reigningchamp.com/) for cotton tees.
Portugal - La Paz (https://lapaz.pt/) - Isto (https://isto.pt/) - Portugese Flannel (https://www.portugueseflannel.com/)
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.
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.
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.
or have any cracks for air to enter the door or doorjam,
that 90% relative humidity should be no problem!
(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.
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.
I spend much more upfront for clothes, but I gain a lot long term. Clothes don't look terrible after few washings and they tend to last forever.
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.
When I travel, I love my merino + nylon shirts because I can wear them for days without washing and they fairly durable.
Researchers have found bacteria that do degrade PET using esterases though: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aad6359 and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
So I guess technically it's biodegradable? Though as it's an energy source give bacteria a few hundred years or so.
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.
I just don't like plastics and try to avoid them as much as possible.
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.
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."
Next question...how do I empty the Dyson container. Ha!
It was probably due to years of UV breakdown of the fibers from daylight.
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.
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).
It looks like I'm not alone in my bafflement: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/01/scary-research-... or https://www.vox.com/climate/475004/microplastics-research-fa...
This is a solvable problem, though. Polyethylene doesn't need plasticizers.
Can someone who knows things about textiles explain to me how the above is different than all the many items I own that say on the label, 60%/40% blend polyester/cotton, etc. I assumed that's what these were.
Edit: Quickly searching, this appears to be the case? Specifically modern moisture sensing dryers that stop appropriately goes a long way to never having something shrink on you.
Similar improvements have been made to improve colorfastness. Mixing new reds and whites used to consistently produce pink. Not anymore.
Same reason why any furniture you order online seems to always have all the tools necessary to assemble it. They never require power tools and always include screwdriver(s) and/or Allen wrenches. They need to design away every possible reason someone might just return it.
I have some semi-recent pinkified cloths.
That said, washing everything on cold water and low temps in the dryer works pretty well at extending the life of cloths.
Pretty soon you find out Frankie wasn't even in the band; The Pet Shop Boys didn't sell dog food at all; Dexy has terrible lap times; the Elfmans weren't actually knighted; etc.
As a pale guy whose wife likes the beach, they have been very helpful.
EDIT: I'm sure they are nowhere near the only brand to use that particular mix of fibers (mostly a variety of polyester/Spandex mixes depending on the shirt), just the one whose shirts I own. And the "fishing" bit is about the designs - very heavy on the fishing/hunting designs.
Once we figured out the problem and stopped using all of the smart features it started working fine. Unfortunately the interface really wants you to use the fancy modes and requires an annoying amount of steps to manually set a drying run. Easily the worst dryer UX I've ever had. I doubt I'll buy another LG appliance, although there are probably plenty of other offenders these days.
My parents' modern dryer is awful, just like yours. The craziest part is that it starts a countdown timer when there's tens of minutes left, as though the designers new the sensor was awful and decided to add some extra drying time to cover it up.
You just have to figure with all that dryer lint after every single load that your items certainly aren't getting any bigger after giving off all those grams of fiber.
You can only imagine whether or not more or less fiber than that is being lost down the drain with your wash water each time.
I wear a lot of 100% cotton (including 100% linen) shirts that still look and fit almost like new, since I'm a stickler about laundering them this way. Towels, on the other hand, get maximum heat for both washing and drying, and you can really see the difference. I use a lot of 100% cotton washcloths from those Target multipacks, and recently bought a set identical to one I'd bought a year or two prior; the new one was larger, a little softer, and a much brighter color. The old one had shrunk to a pale, slightly scratchy ghost of its former self!
On exactly one occasion, I accidentally threw a 100% cotton shirt in the towel hamper and didn't catch it before starting the load. It's not a shirt so much as a crop top now :)
In any case, both cotton and linen get the cold-water treatment from me!
Note that I fully understand it for the anecdotal weight that it has. That is, basically none. Is fun for conversation, but isn't intended to prove anything.
At this point I thought you were going for an ahem heavy-handed joke.
Might have been our new hangers.
On that last, I almost forgot I had direct evidence. We visited a place that shrank some of our clothes that we had washed many times back home.
dryer settings,
local environment in the laundry room.
Probably in that order.
The last thing I had shrink on me was a wool sweater, which was over twenty years ago.
I used the hair conditioner trick to stretch it (same as in this article), which sort of worked.
I am not using a dryer, only a washing machine.
Can UV do that?
Those sensors, across brands, are absolute garbage.
I've heard reports that the newer heat pump clothes dryers are less prone to cause shrinking. In their default mode they act more like a dehumidifier than a heater. In theory you can wash more delicate dry-clean only garments as well.
It's very gentle on clothes, but it does take a bit longer to dry.
The big difference in day to day use for us actually comes by way of the lint trap. Not only do you have to clean the lint trap every time (as normal) you also have to clean the heat exchanger every few loads. This process is a pain in the butt, you have to lie on the ground and gently brush away wet lint off the fins while avoiding bending them. The more lint that is left on the fins the less efficient the dryer is and the longer it takes to dry a load.
This will ultimately end up causing an issue long term (know idea how long) as more and more lint makes its way past the accessible portions of the exchanger and the dryer will take longer and longer. You can in theory take these apart and power wash them but it is not user friendly in the least and probably not worth the effort of a technician.
All together we like the dryer though.
(I've been tempted to just yolo buy one to try it out but installing it in my house is a pain in the rear because of the location.)
We have a lot of "shrinkage" in our house, that I am convinced is more due to both of us uhh "growing" rather than the clothes shrinking ;)
You can imagine, it's a delicate subject
Low temperature washes and avoiding tumble dryers works. I've also noticed thicker material t-shirts seem to definitely shrink a lot less! Much thinner cottton t-shirts seem to shrink a lot more, my mental model is that there's less material so when it bunches together to it's "happy place", it ends up a lot smaller. I have no evidence for this though.
Any other tips from people here? Also, has anyone actually tried stretching with hair conditioner?
Now I just wash on cold and hang dry all my cotton shirts, tees and button-ups. Just use a folding drying rack as simple as this:
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/mulig-drying-rack-indoor-outdoo...
It's a little annoying to have to leave the rack out in the middle of some room to dry overnight, but zero shrinkage ever. The way it fit in the store is the way it still fits three years later.
And no, stretching with conditioner/shampoo doesn't work, because there's no easy way to stretch it the "right" way -- as you tug on spots at the neck and the waist to pull them apart, they stretch but in weird, inconsistent, lumpy ways. The final result just looks like you've had small kids trying to hang from different spots on your shirt and it's all out of shape. Maybe in theory if you had some kind of stretching system with long clamps or something it could work, but who has that? Doing it by hand, it's definitely not a solution.
https://www.landsend.com/shop/mens-tall-t-shirts-tops-tees/S...
And frankly, this seems like less effort than trying to apply some hack to unshrink them after the damage is done.
https://www.ihateironing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/07...
Unless it's a particularly expensive or dry clean only, I just wash at 40 degrees "daily" programme, except for underwear, towels and bedding which go in at 60.
Most stuff is fine. On the rare occasion something gets ruined, I don't get that brand again.
In general it's just smart to wash and (air)dry things inside out. Keep the wear and tear on the inside.
And if you have decent suit jackets, pants or dress shirts, please just steam or hand clean them.
Make sure the shirt is sized so that when you extend your arm laterally, the cuff approaches your knuckle.
If your idea of a fitting shirt happens to be that the cuff just covers a wrist watch when you extend your arm, then you have no spare headroom for shrinkage.
I can't help but be curious now; is this something that other people my age (born in the early 90s) had heard when they were kids? Did people who grew up earlier than that hear it when they were kids, or did this idea maybe not reach mainstream status until a bit later (maybe my parents were relatively early in repeating this wisdom)? Or maybe it's something that used to be common knowledge that's been "lost" to newer generations for some reason? I'm genuinely a bit surprised to see that this article was published just last summer, since I assumed that the basic premise would be have something the average person would have learned before then from existing sources. Maybe I'm assuming too much about whether this article was intended to be about the "what" rather than the "why", but the language seems intended to be approachable to those from a non-scientific background (e.g. "on a chemical level, there are also links between the chains called hydrogen bonds"; I would expect someone talking to another scientist to be more direct and say something like "there are hydrogen bonds" with the expectation that they understood what they were already).
You don't need to wash Hot. Detergents work in cold water now.
Cotton is often pre-shrunk but YMMV.
Personally I do not use any of these chemical additives for clothes. The best wash is unscented detergent with vinegar in the pre-wash (where liquid fabric softner goes). Vinegar does the job of deodorizing, getting rid of static, and fabric softening. You don't need a dryer sheet. I'll use spray and wash still for stains. Dish detergent for oil stains.
I stopped wearing plastic so I'm not sure what modern polyester shirts are like.
Washing cold and drying low means you'll rarely shrink something. My favorite shirts I'll hang dry.
What odd language!
The fact that cotton-poly blends resist shrinking and wrinkling better than natural fibers has been known for like 80 years. While it may be that research continues, the "promising innovation" era of this category lapsed eons ago.
I'm also mystified why the article would not at least acknowledge the existence of something called pre-shrunk cotton, which is a material that is put through processes that cause shrinking before being measured and cut for clothing, to minimize further after-market shrinkage for the consumer.
BTW Rayon is also made from cellulose, cellulose II. While Cellulose I(natural) is metastable it can be converted by disolving in lye to a stable form (beta-gllocouse molecolue chain goes from being parallel to being anti parllel which increases the # of hydrogen bonds as well as helping create a more stable 3d structure) which again improve tensile strength and resist wrinkles on a different scale.
<https://cmosshoptalk.com/2020/06/09/en-dashes-the-editors-ma...> quotes the relevant section here.
I can't find another source for the CMOS.
Cotton tees would stretch like that too if you wore them as tight as jeans are worn around the waist. But we don't wear them that way.
The answer is literally, with great difficulty. Anything tight that needs to be broken in is reaaally tight at first. But when there's a will, there's a way.
As an aside, skinny jeans haven’t been fashionable in years.
Shockingly, after hand washing them for the first time in cold water, the sleeves have shrunk so dramatically that I cannot wear them any longer, except to roll up the sleeves Up to beyond the elbow.
They just lost customer for life. Enshittification strikes again.
Did you put it in the dryer afterwards or something? Like I know that sounds dumb but I'm struggling to imagine what could have possibly caused what you describe.
There's zero "enshittification" of the cotton at a brand like Banana Republic.
I bought two of them, the ones that shrunk. They are labeled as wrinkle-resistant slim shirts, 98% cotton and 2% spandex.
Don't be mistaken, the quality of their apparel has definitely gone down of late. I went on Reddit and its definitely a thing people have noticed.
You can have your own opinions on quality -- if there's anything I know, people have been complaining about the decline of quality of major brands every year for as long as I've been alive. Yet somehow clothes still seem fine. But that's actually irrelevant.
Because the point is, there aren't really any conceivable fabric quality issues that should cause a cotton-spandex shirt to shrink with a cold wash and hang dry. It doesn't matter the brand or quality, that's just not how cotton or spandex work. And even if you do accidentally wash warm once or dry, the denser weave that a dress shirt has will always shrink less than something like a looser Oxford or a t-shirt jersey material. So even just one warm wash on a dress shirt shouldn't have a huge effect.
So truly that's just bizarre. I have no explanation.
When washing warm or machine drying, absolutely, although I'm not sure how much is attributable to the cotton itself versus how much is attributable to the denser weave that tends to come with nicer brands.
But this comment was specifically about washing cold, hence my confusion.
I would imagine most people on this site don't deal with clothes shrinking any more because they are wearing screen-printed, startup-logo-emblazoned tri-blend t-shirts with a very low cotton count. So even though the shirt is presumably using the cheapest, gnarliest short-staple cotton the manufacturer could get his hands on, the sheer amount of manmade fibers in it allows that Custom Ink goodness to remain firmly a Medium for years. Well, that and the hugely boxy fit. How would you notice if any of it shrank?
"Modern" dryers' ability to tumble clothes on low until they are still pretty damp, but now wrinkle-free, then pull it out to finish on a rack means I don't have to give much thought to the proper maintenance of 99% cotton jeans or 100% duck canvas pants. I don't think the 100% cotton American Giant shirts and hoodies are particularly prone to shrinking, either, but they do seem to soak up stains more readily than American Apparel's tri-blends given away as swag.
Indoor hang drying is easy. Get a box fan, and a de-humidifier. Both are about 20$ USD. Now you don't even need to open the windows or worry about what's going on outside.
I went from zero to hero with clothes when I realized I should care about them, and seeing the night and day difference in how long my clothes last has been jarring. Shrinkage is a thing of the past.
