Did you know that the ‘gentle exfoliating microbeads’ that are in many facial products are made of plastic? That’s right, the same plastics that take hundreds if not thousands of years to degrade, and every time you wash your face with them, they go right down the drain, and eventually into the ocean. And while there haven’t been any studies about what happens to them when they reach the ocean, it surely cannot be good.As the blog Low Impact notes:
There haven’t been that many studies on what the long term effect is of these plastic granules floating around the ocean. It appears likely that the particles do end up inside of marine creatures. Zooplankton in particular, tiny marine creatures that filter particles out of the water for food, can end up “swallowing” these little beads. It’s not clear whether the plastic ends up harming these little critters, or if it can start to build up in higher levels as it goes up the food chain.One study has found that these plastic beads can act as a sponge for such poisons as DDT and PCBs. So wherever these bits of plastic end up, they bring some unwelcome baggage with them!
If you’d like to avoid making this problem worse, look for “polyethylene” in the ingredients. Olay Smooth Skin Exfoliating Scrub with Gentle Microbeads, for instance, has plastic microbeads, as you can tell from it’s ingredient list:
Water, Cetyl Betaine, PPG 15 Stearyl Ether, Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, Glycerine, Oxidized Polyethylene, Stearyl Alcohol, Salicylic Acid, Distearyldimonium Chloride, Cetyl Alcohol, Steareth 21, Behenyl Alcohol, PPG 30, Steareth 2, Fragrance, Disodium EDTA, Ferric Ammonium Ferrocyanide
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