It is a well known fact that plastic is bad for the environment. The process of making plastic involves using large quantities of oil—a rapidly diminishing resource, not to mention one of the most controversial political topics today. Plastic does not decompose (chemically break down into simpler forms of matter) in any reasonable time scale, which means that it sits in landfills for thousands of years, or worse, ends up in our oceans and waterways where it is ingested by, and eventually kills, large numbers of marine organisms. And even though all of this is well known fact, millions of Americans wash tiny pieces of plastic down their drains every day. True, most of these people do not know they are doing it, but in this case, ignorance is not bliss. The tiny pieces of plastic that I am talking about are microscopic beads used as exfoliates and they are found in a surprising number of popular, brand-name soaps and scrubs.
My recent posts on the great Pacific garbage patch and the great Atlantic garbage patch made me wonder: What exactly is causing all of that plastic to end up in the ocean? My research alerted me to a book by Alan Weisman entitled The World Without Us that describes, as the titles suggests, what would happen to everything on earth if humans were to just magically disappear. One chapter, Polymers are Forever, talks about polyethylene, the most widely used plastic compound in the world, and how it is commonly found in shower massage creams, body scrubs, and hand soaps as an exfoliate. In the past, exfoliates were made of grounded up seeds or oats. But recently, manufacturers have been switching over to polyethylene. Whether they switched because it is cheaper or creates a more consistent product is unknown. The fact remains that millions of Americans wash billions of plastic particles down the drain and into the ocean everyday.
Why is plastic so bad? Well, as I mentioned before, plastic does not decompose, which means that once it is made, it is here to stay. However, when plastic is left out in the sun, it breaks up into smaller and smaller plastic pieces until it is microplastic—plastic fragments that are 1 mm or smaller. And this is when it gets really dangerous. Researchers reported, in this article in a popular science magazine, that “free-floating toxins from all kinds of sources—copy paper, automobile grease, coolant fluids, old fluorescent tubes, and infamous discharges by General Electric and Monsanto plants directly into streams and rivers—readily stick to the surfaces of free-floating plastic.” The toxic microplastic is then ingested by marine organisms like zooplankton that comb the sea eating particles in the water. Zooplankton and other similar organisms at the bottom of the food chain are then eaten by predators and the toxins are amplified as it takes each step up the food chain, eventually ending up in humans. The same article reported, “[o]ne study directly correlated ingested plastics with PCBs in the fat tissue of puffins. The astonishing part was the amount. Takada and his colleagues found that the plastic pellets eaten by the birds concentrated poisons to levels as high as 1 million times their normal occurrence in seawater.”
Microplastics are not, by any means, the whole problem. Other small plastics (larger than microplastics) are routinely ingested by marine animals, who may either choke on them and die or end up with so much plastic in their stomachs that they starve to death. But one of the biggest things about plastic exfoliates is that they don't need to break down in order to end up in the stomachs of marine life. They are manufactured to be small, and they are meant to be washed down the drain, which leads them straight to the ocean. Exfoliates almost seem like they were designed to murder marine animals.
How does the polyethylene get from our sinks to the ocean? Well, all of the wastewater we create gets transferred to a sewage treatment plant. There, it is treated to make it as clean as possible again. Some of that water is reused, but a lot of that treated water is dumped into the ocean. Microplastics and small pieces of polyethylene—including those used in exfoliating scrubs—are too small to be caught by the treatment filtering systems. So they get dumped into the ocean along with this rest of the treated waste water.
I, myself, was ignorant of the polyethylene exfoliate problem until I read The World Without Us, and after doing more research, I was surprised to see the brands of soaps that were included in a still incomplete list of soaps to avoid if you don’t want to contribute to this problem. I have been using the Bath and Body Works line of hand soaps for years now only to find out that their signature blue scrubbing beads are really polyethylene. Other popular brands like Clean and Clear, Neutrogena, and Oil of Olay also use polyethylene in their products. There are a few brands out there, like St. Ives and Burt’s Bees, still fighting the good fight and using natural exfoliates.
The biggest problem I have with this whole situation is that no one knows about it. For years, huge corporations have been manufacturing these harmful products and we, as consumers, have been buying them and using them, directly, but ignorantly, harming the environment. Why is it that no one knows that their favorite face wash is killing cute little seals? As I mentioned in my previous posts on the world’s garbage patches, once the plastic reaches the ocean, it is almost impossible to get it back out. No effective method of clearing the garbage patches has been found. That means at this point, the best offense is defense! We have to stop polluting the ocean with plastics. People need to be informed about polyethylene exfoliates so they can make an educated choice when picking out their soaps and scrubs. While I was able to find some news articles and blog posts about this issue (like this one, this one, and this one), there was not as much publicity about it as one would hope. We can all help by spreading the word, but more importantly, by voting with our dollars. If people were to all stop buying polyethylene scrubs, you can be sure that companies would get the message and stop making them. Post about this issue on your blog, tell your friends, and even write to your favorite (or ex-favorite) cosmetics company either to tell them thanks for caring about the environment, or thanks for not caring.
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