Microbeads – the microscopic globules in your face scrub – may be too tiny to notice, but they are causing great damage to our environment.
What are these microbeads anyway? According to the U.S. Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015, “Microbead means any solid plastic particle that is less than five millimeters in size and is intended to be used to exfoliate or cleanse the human body or any part thereof.” Simply put, these are tiny plastic balls that are found in most face scrubs, face soaps, shower gels, toothpastes and even age-defying skincare products.
Though they seem innocuous, these little plastic beads are tiny ticking bombs just waiting to explode! They are too small to be filtered by wastewater treatment plants, and pour out into the waterways, finally landing in our oceans. There they remain, as they don’t get dissolved, increasing the toxin level of our waters drastically. In fact, a single microbead can be million times more harmful than the water around it.* Now imagine the scale of damage given the fact that each 130gm tube contains more than 14,000 million plastic beads. A study by Plymouth University revealed some shocking facts: a single wash can discharge around 94,500 microbeads into our surroundings.
And the worst part? Phytoplankton and zooplankton, which form the lowest rung of the marine food chain, can actually ingest these beads. When fish in turn consume these planktons, the toxins enter their body and cause severe damage. Other sea creatures like oysters, clams and mussels also eat these plastic balls. As seafood is integral to our diets, we ourselves then become susceptible to unknowingly consuming the very plastic beads that we had washed away!
In the wake of growing protests by several environment protection groups, governments of various countries have finally sat up and taken notice. In the US, it became illegal to sell personal care products containing microbeads from 2017. The UK too has just passed a law to ban the manufacture of products containing microbeads. Canada and Australia are also considering stringent laws on this issue. Closer home, Taiwan is all set to ban microbeads from July 2018.
Though Hong Kong government is yet to pass any such official law, some big beauty retailers already have anti-microbead policy in place. For instance, Sa Sa pledges that by 31 December 2018, it will not sell any private-label product that has microbeads in its formulation. Sa Sa has also started a dialogue with its vendors to find harmless alternatives to microbeads.
Alternatives are easy to find. Plenty of natural products like apricot shells, jojoba beans, pumice, crushed nuts, salt, charcoal, sand, sugar, pumice and oatmeal are available. Then why don’t personal-care brands switch to natural substitutes? Well, for starters, plastic is cheaper. It is also ‘smoother’, which means it exfoliates less effectively, urging you to use it everyday. That way, you finish the tube faster and buy more and sooner!
So it’s up to us to take a closer look at the ingredients list every time we pick up a cleanser from the racks. Steer clear of products that have polyethylene or polypropylene or polyethylene terephthalate or polymethlyl methacrylate or nylon. They’re all basically plastic.
You know you don’t want to end up eating microbeads each time you order your favourite seafood!
* Chelsea M. Rochman, Eunha Hoh, Tomofumi Kurobe and Swee J. Teh, Ingested plastic transfers hazardous chemicals to fish and induces hepatic stress, Scientific Reports 3, Article number: 3263
Text: Suchetana Mukhopadhyay