Products containing plastic microbeads. Photo via the author.

You’re vigorously scrubbing your face with the newest buzzword-laden exfoliating gel, trying to rid yourself of an incoming breakout. It’s probably something many of us have done, but what you probably didn’t realize about your beauty regimen was that you were actually rubbing little plastic beads all over your face. They’re called microbeads and can be in body wash, hand soap, facial scrubs, and even toothpaste under the ingredient names of polyethylene and polypropylene. If it sounds disgusting that you’re giving yourself a plastic facial, that’s because it is, and not just for you personally—these bits of plastic wash down the drain, creating a catastrophic situation in the water system.
Annoncering

Currently, the water in Lake Ontario and Michigan are being surveyed for microbeads, and while they’ve been found to be in all the Great Lakes, data hasn’t been published yet for all of these bodies of water.
Annoncering
Annoncering

Both New York and California have also seen bills in their legislation processes on banning microplastics in personal care products, but there hasn’t been any action in Canada yet. Over the week of August 17, a bill negotiated by 5 Gyres was defeated by one vote in California. And while the state borders an ocean instead of the Great Lakes, legislation there can be a model for the states and Canadian province that do border the lakes.“Actually I was just talking to the attorney general’s office… they want to allow for biodegradable plastics in the New York legislation,” Mason says. “So basically the attorney general’s office said, ‘We’ll allow that, but you have to verify that they biodegrade and we have to certify the process… the industry kind of turned around and said, ‘Oh, never mind.’ But in Illinois, they are allowing.”
Annoncering
Annoncering

While 5 Gyres has been focusing mainly on state legislation that would ban the harmful microbeads, The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative (GLSLC), a coalition of 114 Canadian and American cities, has been centering in on the companies that make the products. They wrote to 11 of these companies with varied results—some said they were already in the process of phasing them out, while others completely ignored the letters. Colgate-Palmolive agreed to remove them by the end of this year (the earliest stated by any companies), while Proctor & Gamble said 2017. Some, such as L’Oréal and Johnson & Johnson, haven’t even given a date.So why not? Well, apparently it usually takes two years to reformulate a product, then a company has to get it approved by a government organization. I guess it’s just not enough that mircobeads have been proven to be harmful.“[The companies] said the biggest problem is working through the Food & Drug Administration regulatory process because it takes some time to get approval for changing the products… None of them said that it was a financial issue,” says David Ullrich, executive director of GLSLC.Meanwhile, countless of these bits of plastic will continue to wash into the Great Lakes while these already-rich companies drag along and fight the process of reformulating their products with actual natural ingredients that aren’t any kind of plastic.
Annoncering