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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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