Trillions of microbeads polluting US aquatic habitats daily

Stephanie Green is a conservation research fellow with the College of Science at Oregon State University. Wastewater treatment plants, she said, simply weren’t created to handle microbeads, which she describes as “very durable”.

Companies such as L’Oreal, Johnson and Johnson, Colgate-Palmolive, Unilever, and Proctor and Gamble have already started taking preventive measure to replace the plastic microbeads sometime in the near future with safer and greener alternatives.

The researchers found the amount of microbeads quantity by using extremely conservative methodology.

But, it gets pretty hard to comprehend why such huge volumes, enough to cover several tennis courts pose a huge threat to wildlife, every single day. The other 99 percent – 800 trillion microbeads each day – end up in the sludge of sewage plans and are often spread over land areas, where they eventually make their way into the oceans through runoff.

The culprits are household products-such as body wash and toothpaste-which contain these miniature menaces, and Americans are washing an estimated 808 trillion microbeads down the drain every day. Previous studies by the same team proved that they can carry many unsafe contaminants to animals with toxic effect.

“We argue that the scientific evidence regarding microplastic supports legislation calling for a removal of plastic microbeads from personal care products”, Rochman said in a statement.

They can be found in a number of different kinds of products from all sorts of industries, not just personal care, and many cosmetics manufacturers are phasing them out of their products following growing concern. Therefore, scientists are urging legislation to ban the microbeads.

The worldwide Business Times notes that Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon, and California regulate or ban their useconditionally, but in some cases, microbeads are only prohibited in “rinse off” products, which don’t include deodorants and cleaners. These plastic microbeads, which are mainly used as exfoliation agents in toothpaste, scrubs and face-wash creams, are so tiny that they can not be filtered through existing sewerage treatment plants and hence end up in rivers and oceans.

Microbeads, those tiny little plastic bits added to cleaning products to make them work better, are pouring into the environment at a staggering rate. The microbead problem is apart of a bigger problem regarding plastic debris in the ocean.

As they push for federal action, conservationists and scientists are celebrating the small victory in California that, they believe, could be the first step towards a sea change in microbead regulation.

As this report points out, the language of some bans allows companies to slip through regulatory loopholes.