Well I was cleaning the lint-filter and I was wondering how many cycles would it take for an average load of clothes to be broken down into basically nothing but lint?
I realise that some clothing is more delicate than others (and probably shouldn’t be put through the washing-machine at all, learnt that one the hard way…) but assuming an average load of average household clothing?
Thanks in advance 
I’m pulling numbers out of my ass here, but let’s say that the washing produces 1 g of lint (not all of which, of course, will be caught by the filter) per kilogram of clothes for each cycle. This gives a breakdown factor of 0.999 per cycle. Reducing the amount of clothes by a total factor f would require n cycles, expressed by n= ln f / ln 0.999. So, half the mass of the clothes will remain after 693, 10% after 2301 and 1% after 4603 cycles.
I see, thank you 
Here’s what I know: Once your towels stop depositing lint in the filter in the dryer to the point of clogging it, those towels are done for. They may still look like towels, but they are just pieces of cloth.
Yes, many kinds of fabric don’t lose lint at a steady rate, so I don’t think Ignotus is on the right track. Dryer lint is mostly short fine fibers, so fuzzy fabrics, particularly from natural fibers such as cotton, shed the most, but once the fine stuff is gone, the long fibers left won’t produce much if any lint. Silk, by contrast, doesn’t usually produce any noticeable amount of lint no matter how many times it is washed because it doesn’t have much of the short fine fibers, and many synthetic fabrics, such as microfibers and rayon, behave similarly.
I admit that the fixed rate decay model probably is a bit simplistic. Not only will, as noted, the rate drastically decrease when the short fibers are gone; it will also increase once the integrity of the fabric is breached and you get tears and holes, which will tend to grow more rapidly from the edges.
I guess we need a lot more experimental data before we can come up with a better model.