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California Votes To Ban Microbeads
New submitter Kristine Lofgren writes: The California Assembly just passed a vote to ban toxic microbeads, the tiny flecks found in toothpastes and exfoliants. Microbeads cause a range of problems, from clogging waterways to getting stuck in gums. The ban would be the strictest of its kind in the nation. As the article notes, the California Senate would need to pass a bill as well, for this ban to take effect, and if that happens, the resulting prohibition will come into place in 2020. From the article: Last year, Illinois became the first state in the U.S. to pass a ban on the usage of microbeads in cosmetics, approving a law that will go into effect in 2018, and earlier this year two congressmen introduced a bipartisan bill to outlaw the use of microbeads nationwide. And for exceptionally good reason; the beads, which serve as exfoliants and colorants are a massive source of water pollution, with scientists estimating that 471 million plastic microbeads are released into San Francisco Bay alone every single day.
You explicitly make it impossible for anyone to determine your contribution to the community.
You just make mindlessly hostile comments to random posts on the site.
Kill yourself.
If your words were source code, it wouldn't compile.
lucm, indeed.
A medical centrifuge accelerates this process dramatically....
really? how long will it take you to filter sewage with a medical centrifuge?
And if not, then we need to look at other means of processing the water. Possibly some sort of industrial centrifuge would be a good idea?
Why why why does every single municipal sewage treatment plant on the entire planet need a massive upgrade because there are people out there who cannot stand the concept of having dead skin cells on their faces?
I dare you to tell us the cost of fitting tanks and skimmers into every sewer in California. Or every other body of water it flows into .. like apparently 471 million plastic microbeads are released into San Francisco Bay alone every single day.
Filtering the inputs to San Francisco Bay would be ridiculously expensive. Outlawing this plastic crap makes far more sense.
What you describe is theoretically possible, but utterly absurd in reality.
It's not a nothing issue. It's huge amount of crap dumped into waterways which acts like silt, doesn't break down, and otherwise serves to give people whiter teeth (or whatever the hell it's used for).
California has decided that's a dumb idea.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I don't know how much energy that would gobble.
You're an idiot. ;)
The problem is, sewage treatment systems have a lot of trouble (at present, let's just simply say "can't") filtering them out. They go into the sewage, they will go into the sea.
Setting up filters for particles as small as 1 micron for all sewage going out into the ocean is obviously going to be a massive expensive. Who wants to pay for that so that people can keep sticking bits of plastic in cosmetics?
Seriously, whose bright idea was it to make bits of plastic, bite-size for plankton, looking like fish eggs, whose very design intent is to wash out into the ocean? And no, while they're not harmful to us, they absolutely will be to plankton - if not immediately (how healthy do you think you'd be if you wolfed down an entire meal-sized chunk of plastic?), then with time. Plastics act as chelators for heavy metals and a number of organic poisons, to such a degree that they might even be economical to mine. There's simply no way that this isn't going to have an impact.
And it's so stupid when one can just use soluble crystals (salts, sugars, etc) instead of plastic.
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