The Widespread Environmental Footprint of Indigo Denim\nMicrofibers from Blue Jeans
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At\nany moment, approximately half of the world’s population\nis wearing blue jeans and other denim garments. We examine the footprint\nof our modern blue jean society by investigating the environmental\ndistribution, pathways, and sources of indigo denim microfibers shed\nby denim clothing. Microfibers comprised 87–90% of the anthropogenic\nparticles found in sediments from the Canadian Arctic Archipelago,\nLaurentian Great Lakes, and shallow suburban lakes in southern Ontario.\nTwenty-one to fifty-one percent of all microfibers in sediments were\nanthropogenically modified cellulose (AC), of which 40–57%\nwere indigo denim microfibers (12–23% of all microfibers analyzed).\nAC microfibers were also found in rainbow smelt from the Great Lakes.\nWastewater treatment plant effluent collected in southern Ontario\ncontained 22 ± 18 microfibers L<sup>–1</sup>, 13% of which\nwere dyed with indigo, characteristic of denim fabrics. Finally, as\na source for introduction into wastewater, we found that one pair\nof used jeans can release 56000 ± 4100 microfibers per wash.\nMicrofibers from jean laundering were consistent in chemical composition\nand morphology with those found in the environment. We conclude that\nblue jeans, the world’s single most popular garment, are an\nindicator of the widespread burden of anthropogenic pollution by adding\nsignificantly to the environmental accumulation of microfibers from\ntemperate to Arctic regions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".