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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.
yes yes ... but it says "exceptionally good reason" ... there must be harm ... exceptionally serious harm ... right?
471 million potatos is a lot of potatos. .2mm bits of plastic is enough to cover in plastic all of the living rooms in California.
471 million
Wait - no - one living room. Or about a dinner-plates worth a day.
This isn't the first time that I've seen mention of this. If I'm remembering previous articles correctly, these beads are ending up being consumed by very small sea creatures, who cannot process them, who then are eaten by bigger sea creatures, who also cannot process them, etc, until they build up in large concentrations toward the top of the foodchain to poison those alpha predators. There's concern for humans that eat those largest animals too.
Honestly I'm surprised that they were legal in the first place, but if there wasn't an explicit law against them then I guess the companies that have manufactured and used them were free to do so regardless of any perceived morality on the matter.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I've read up on this a bit, and it seems that micro beads end up being ingested by a lot of aquatic life, and cause health problems. Along with that, the heaver ones sink and carpet areas of aquatic floor, and smother out aquatic plant life. the rest probably end up in the giant Atlantic/Pacific garbage patches, which we don't need to make bigger.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
So how much pollution do 471million microbeads actually make?
Wouldn't that be 471 beads?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It gets stuck in some species guts, and some smaller invertebrates guts dramatically reducing their ability to feed.
It is an actual problem.
Another major issue is the beads attract pollutants onto their surfaces. These are then efficiently transferred into whatever ingests them.
There is very little reason to be using plastic microbeads, rather than - for example - wood.
It's a little more than that. Studies have shown toxic pollutants bind to microbeads. Other studies have shown fish are eating the microbeads and absorbing the toxins. Humans eat fish. Microbeads are poisoning our food supply, and a number of governments are sponsoring studies to learn more about their impact.
Here's another article:
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/environmentalists-drawing-a-bead-on-microplastics
it's a little different. The microbeads bind to organic pollutants that were already in the water. Animals that eat the beads absorb the pollutants from every bead that passes through their system. The pollutants then move up the foodchain after leaving the beads behind in feces. Even small to medium sized fish are found to have 10-20 beads in their digestive tract at any given time.
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.
I won't take you seriously until I see some unit tests.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
That's why I eat only organisms without a digestive tract.
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.
However, I am questioning the quality of your water treatment process if this is actually a problem.
Have you ever heard of "Ocean Spray"? They grow lots and lots of cranberries. The crush the cranberries to make juice. They flush the dead cranberry skins down the drain. The local sewage treatment plant has terrible issues because the massive amount of cranberry residue screws with the chemical processes in the sewage treatment plant so that none of the sewage gets treated properly.
The moral of the story is that sewage treatment plants are designed to handle the standard sewage that we all dump down the drain and they are not prepared to handle stuff that is not expected.
Maybe YOU are willing to put up with a big increase in your local taxes to pay for the extra equipment needed?
Your second point seems a tad weak as before being stuck on the bead, said pollutants are floating freely in the water the organisms large and small breath.
Who says they are "floating freely in the water"? These beads will soak up oils that normally float on top of the water, and carry it down into the water to life that otherwise does not come in contact with those oils.
My understanding of the process is
wrong
The problem isn't necessarily the beads or whether or not they're toxic (though obviously, if they're made of a toxic material and being ingested that's a big problem).
What's of concern is that it could potentially contribute, in a huge way, to a problem referred to as "plastic soup," a conglomeration of plastics from various sources, microbeads, regular trash being dumped at sea and so on. This isn't a small problem, either. The largest of "patches" of plastic debris could potentially be twice as big as the entire landmass of the U.S. as you can see here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The exact size of the patch is hard to estimate for another reason, a lot of these plastics are _extremely_ difficult to see, particles that are essentially suspended just below the surface of the water. There are a lot of big, solid items in these patches that can be identified, but it's the former "soup" of plastic particles that's the real issue...they're hard to identify, they're hard to clean up and in the case of microbeads, they're hard to filter out of the water supply. Considering they offer little to no benefit in any of their commercial applications that I can see, I'm wondering why they haven't been banned already. I could easily see these cosmetic companies producing a fine-grained sand from any tropical beach and calling that "all natural microdermabrasion," it'd do less harm and people would probably buy the hell out of the stuff.
Not the OP here. Anonymity was not his/her point. An audit trail was the point. You can read all of Kamashock's "record." That would be their previous posts. AC on the other hand...oh wait, did I just throw a crust of bread under a bridge?
[UID-HeinzIntel]
They're not toxic really to anything, not even zooplankton. The biggest problem comes from the stuff lower in the foodchain that can eat it and block up their digestive system, or collect in there causing the creature in question to starve to death.
One of the big problems with sewage plants is there is a capacity limit to them, and when they hit capacity they dump directly into rivers/oceans/etc. That most happens in places where waste water and sewage are still on one system aka most of the world and they get rain.
Om, nomnomnom...
The article doesn't support the statement that the microbeads are toxic.
Is there any information that the microbeads are actually toxic?
True story. Had a friend in college who would tell you any chance he got to stay away from microbeads, they were the worst thing ever invented, Satan's gift to mankind, etc.
Seems he'd gotten a handjob from a girl who used microbead-laced lotion and it burned the hell out of his junk.
Nothing posted to
Let's see, people are talking about beads under 0.2mm diameter. They aren't cubes, so they won't fully fill that space, but we'll calculate it as though they do.
471,000,000 beads a day.
To turn that into a volume we find the cube root, which in this case rounds to 778.
Now those beads spoken of here are again only 0.2mm, so that means we have to divide that 778 beads length on a side by 5 to find out it's 155.6mm.
If we convert that to inches, that means the entire 471 million beads we are talking about would equal a cube about 6.1259 inches across on each side.
That's smaller than a football, which if you didn't know, is 11 inches long.
Of course, if you remember earlier I said we'd calculate those beads as cubes because the math is easier. If we guess that they are spherical, or close enough to that volume ratio, and then we compress the resulting cube of beads down so there is not residual space (look at a jar of marbles, there's a lot of empty space in there that isn't marbles) then the cube we end up with is a bit more than half the size pre-optimization.
Of course I doubt those beads are all that uniform in shape, but it's handy to know how much you are dealing with in a form you can visualize.
You speak about Ocean Spray in the present tense. From a quick Google it seems that this was happening around 1988 and that the company got in trouble for it.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Although the beads aren't toxic, they can and do adsorb hydrophilic pollutants such as PCBs and other oily pollutants such as dioxins. Normally these chemicals settle out into the lake/river bottoms (or evaporate from the surface), but when they attach to microbeads, which being small and similar density to water, they can stay dispersed in the water. Small creatures eat the beads and the PCBs or whatever enter the animals flesh through the gut, and it is supposed that predatory fish at the top of the food chain will have higher levels of the pollutants due to bioamplification in the same fashion that mercury is found in higher levels in top of the food chain oceanic predatory fish.
PCBs and dioxins in the food are bad news for humans in even very tiny quantities.
However, although they are finding and counting the beads in fish, I have not seen anyone doing measurements of captured fish to see to what degree fish are capturing pollutants.
OTOH, it doesn't make sense to wait until things get really bad to decide to solve the problem. Once these beads get into lakes and rivers, there's no way to get them out.
Quite right for the government. It is better to make the polluter remove pollutants than accept them in the system and process them.
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.
POTUS Witch Hunt tracker: 75 charges filed against 19 witches, 4 witches cooperating and 5 witches have pled guilty.
http://conbio.org/images/conte...
Microbead contamination and harm Although their small size makes them difficult to detect, microbeads have been found in inland and coastal aquatic habitats 4,5 and in fish 6 . Experiments have demonstrated harm in fish 9,10 from plastics that are the same type, size and shape as common microbeads. Microbeads pass through water treatment facilities, are released into natural wat erways and become microplastic debris. Microplastic is ubiquitous in aquatic habitats , including bays 11,12 , estuaries and shorelines 13,14 , coral reefs 15 , the deep - sea 15 , freshwater lakes 16 , rivers 5 and Arctic Sea ice 17 . Microplastics persist in aquatic and terrestrial habitats for decades where they accumulate hazardous chemicals. Microplastic has been reported in hundreds of species globally, including marine mammals, turtles, seabirds, fish and invertebrates 18 . Microplastics cause physical and chemical ha rm to animals 9,19 . Physically, micro plastic can cause cellular necrosis, inflammation and lacerations in the digestive tract 20 . Chemically, microplastic is associated with a complex mixture of chemicals, many of which are priority pollutants under the US E PA Clean Water Act for being persistent , bioacummulative and/or toxic 21 . C hemicals associated with this âcocktailâ(TM) can accumulate in animals that eat them 9,10,19,22 - 27 and cause liver toxicity and disrupt the endocrine system 9,10 .
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Congratulations. You've misinterpreted the "the only complaint" that you saw. It's more than just man-made "pollution". It's more accurate to say they concentrate other toxins.
First of all, a number of natural toxins exist and are produced every day by organisms (e.g. cyanide) and natural phenomena like volcanic activity. Just like man-made pollutants, those natural toxins are being passed up the food chain via microbeads when they should be resting harmlessly outside the reach of our food chain.
Second, pollution exists and cannot be "undone". It's ludicrous to bring up the fantasy of "if there was no other pollution" because we've been making very large and very permanent deposits ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Currently, the only real solution to this problem is time and patience, and microbeads interfere with our ability to bide that time without inflicting harm upon the majority of animal life on this planet.