The Tiny, Toxic Terror in Your Bathroom

Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,

Every day, 8 trillion of them flow directly from sewage treatment plants into American rivers, ponds, lakes, and oceans. Farmers spread an additional hundreds of trillions daily on their fields as part of treated sewage sludge.

They may compromise the worst environmental hazard you’ve never heard of.

Fortunately, you can do something about them.

They are microbeads. A September 2015 editorial published in Environmental Science and Technology¹ (EST) describes them as plastic fragments ranging from 5 micrometers (about the size of a red blood cell) to 1 millimeter (the head of a pin).

Made from synthetic polymers including polyethylene, polylactic acid, polypropylene, polystyrene, and polyethylene terephthalate, they are added to hundreds of products.

Their usual purpose is to help the chemicals in products that clean or scrub surfaces. So they are common in face washes, body washes, cosmetics, and cleaning supplies.

Such products used to contain natural substances such as pumice, oatmeal, or walnut husks, but since these are expensive, microbeads increasingly fill the bill.

Once they scrub your face or countertop, these miniscule plastic bits do not, unfortunately, disappear. The EST report states:

“Microbeads are designed to be discarded down the drain. Because of their small size, some microbeads are littered into the environment via final effluent or biosolids (sewage sludge) from wastewater treatment plants… and have become one of the many types of microplastic debris reported in aquatic habitats.”

You’d think that before adding hundreds of trillions of synthetic, indigestible, potentially toxic particles to the environment each day, someone somewhere would have investigated whether this was a good idea.

After all, ecosystems are food chains in which large creatures eat smaller ones, so the whole edifice depends upon a natural, healthful foundation.

According to the International Campaign Against Microbeads in Cosmetics:

“Marine species are unable to distinguish between food and microplastics and therefore indiscriminately feed on microplastics. In an overview published for the Convention on Biological Diversity, it was shown that over 663 different species were negatively impacted by marine debris with approximately 11 percent of reported cases specifically related to the ingestion of microplastics. Some species of fish excrete plastic easily, but others do not and so accumulate plastic internally. To cite one study: Around 35 percent of 670 fish examined (total of six species) had microplastics in their stomachs.”

There are no definitive studies on direct effects to human beings from ingesting microbeads or seafood that has eaten microbeads.

But leached materials in plastics have been shown to disrupt endocrine systems, which in turn can lead to a wide variety of diseases including cancer and diseases of the kidney and prostate.²

Since wastewater plants are not typically designed to filter out microbeads, the EST report’s authors say the only practical solution is to ban their use.

Illinois, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Colorado have put either partial or total bans in place. And fortunately, some companies are not waiting for more regulation.

Unilever, The Body Shop, IKEA, Target Corp., L’Oreal, Colgate-Palmolive, Procter & Gamble, and Johnson & Johnson have all reportedly pledged to stop using microbeads in their “rinse off” personal care products.

But until these public and private efforts result in microbeads’ extinction (which may take years or decades), it’s vital to avoid products that use them. For a list of companies that sell microbead-free products, see the Beat the Microbead website.

An even easier solution is simply to avoid synthetic-chemical-based cleaning products in general.

Natural bar soaps (widely available at farmers’ markets and natural food stores) and a simple solution of half white vinegar, half warm water can cover a wide range of personal and household cleaning needs.

I’ll write about other safe personal and household cleaners in a future issue.

Brad Lemley
Editor, Natural Health Solutions

Citations

1. Chelsea M. Rochman, Sara M. Kross, Jonathan B. Armstrong, Michael T. Bogan, Emily S. Darling, Stephanie J. Green, Ashley R. Smyth, Diogo Veríssimo. Scientific Evidence Supports a Ban on Microbeads. Environmental Science and Technology. September 2015

2. Manikkam M, Tracey R, Guerrero-bosagna C, Skinner MK. Plastics derived endocrine disruptors (BPA, DEHP and DBP) induce epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of obesity, reproductive disease and sperm epimutations. PLoS ONE. 2013