> It's possible fish are eating the pellets, believing them to be eggs, he added. That's worrisome, because plastics tend to absorb pollutants such as PCBs, pesticides and motor oil. The pellets could therefore be poisoning the small fish that larger fish then prey on, and the larger fish are consumed by humans, posing a human health risk.
Wow, how kind of them. How about we stop politely asking our Manufacturer Overlords to stop their destructive activity in 4 years and instead get legislators do their job and ban their use immediately?
A local or state politician in the Great Lakes area should have no interest in protecting a manufacturer of these products who is likely in another state or country. Their interest is entirely in favor of protecting the Lakes.
And who are these people scrubbing their faces with microscopic plastic beads? What's wrong with good old fashioned coarse salt or sugar? Why do we need more plastic? Can this plastic be inhaled accidentally? Can it leach into the raw scrubbed skin? Who asks these questions?
They're probably sitting on a stockpile of material, and would have to write it off as a loss. Either that, or they're committed to contracts with suppliers.
Note the following from the article:
we took science ... to the companies and, without
having to spend time and money involved in a policy
solution, the companies themselves chose to solve it on
their own.
This means that, since the behavior is voluntary, they get to do it on their own timeline. In order to force anything to go faster would require some cattle-prod of a law or regulation, with punitive measures that hurt the bottom line through fines and injunctions.
Which points to another possibility: They know how long it would actually take to get those kinds of laws enacted and enforced, and they'll only go as fast as that.
And don't forget, two years is enough time to forget about this. So in two years, maybe they'll simply do nothing at all.
They need to test the new products which will replace these. You have to cook something up, make trial products, sell them in locations outside the US where there is even less consumer protection than exists here, collect feedback on potential side-effects, and quite possibly iterate.
I can't imagine they are making their product on an order-by-order basis. Nor would they be buying supplies for their product that way, and selling back supplies is not a frictionless process. Of course there is a stockpile.
It's plastic. They sell it in the form of "hurdles" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_particle_water_pollutio...), small plastic particles, which are mostly standard sizes. These are then processed into their final form as required by simple machinery. Typically these are fed into an injection molding machine to make plastic parts, but could be used to produce plastic bags or sheet plastic for thermoforming.
Unless they're adding something to the plastic, or coating it in something, they could absolutely just ship it back as smaller than usual nurdles, or make use of it for something else in their manufacturing process, like making bottles or caps.
In any case, do you really think they have a two year supply of this stuff? That'd be crazy.
I find it very plausible that they have a two-year supply of particular products, that can easily happen if demand does not meet expectations, or if they planned limited campaigns of particular products.
These micro particles of plastic are used by the train load which is why it's horrifying they're still being used. Where would you keep a two year supply if you needed that much of this sort of material? A plant the size of Wyoming? Secondly, they do not have warehouses of toothpaste sitting around. It's perishable.
This isn't the 1920s. Most major companies run on much leaner inventory, and it's not uncommon to turn over your entire warehouse several times a month.
Because the government can't turn around and unilaterally ban something instantly. This is a good thing.
Building a body of research evidence, drafting legislation, putting it out for review, getting it passed into law, etc. all these things take time. It could then get challenged legally which would obviously take more time. Plus you then have to give companies time to figure out what's in their pipeline and remove it.
The legislative route could easily take years longer than companies willingly switching away based upon preliminary evidence. It took a decade for DDT to be banned and that was with a lot more evidence against it.
>Wow, how kind of them. How about we stop politely asking our Manufacturer Overlords to stop their destructive activity in 4 years and instead get legislators do their job and ban their use immediately?
Sadly, this solution is probably far quicker than an adversarial legislative one. It would be very difficult to get that legislation passed without overwhelming evidence of harm to combat the organization's lobbying dollars.
>A local or state politician in the Great Lakes area should have no interest in protecting a manufacturer of these products who is likely in another state or country.
Can they mail a check? If so, he/she has plenty of interest in protecting the manufacturer. The way it works every day, sadly.
My girlfriend makes natural scrubs. Struggles. Natural stuff is objectively better in blind trials, and cheaper, but people see natural products as "supplemental" to their "beauty regime" (fuck I hate that phrase), secondary to P&G/Unilever bullshit - which is a mindset I just can't comprehend.
We are now born into a transgenerational consumer culture. Most of us never have an independent thought. QED.
It's not good. It's most likely the manufacturers were aware of the problems, and decided to do nothing about it (as using plastic beads is likely cheaper) unless they were called out on it. They could then quickly switch to the already pre-planned alternative, making themselves look good in the processes.
Is plastic really cheaper than good old fashion sugar? I think it is more plastics have a ohhhhhh fancy "specially formulated" marketing appeal to them. They put them in clear bottles to show them off, hey look MICROBEADS! Example: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3SVQtbwrvVY/Tk2uks5kLHI/AAAAAAAAGM... See, look? BURSTING BEADS® It's even a registered trademark. They can't say with sugar® or ground walnut® (which is what St. Ives's apricot scrub uses). Doesn't sound high tech enough.
Yes, sugar is hellishly expensive (in comparison). Why do you think cheap food stuffs use HFCS and similar sweetners instead of "good old fashion sugar"? Plastic is cheaper than a lot of other "traditional" or "natural" materials, it's why its often used in e.g. packaging that used to be paper/card.
You can put a trademark on anything you want, it's not a patent on the substance. Evian is trademark on water, for example.
Indeed, and Oil is artificially cheap (other subsidies aside, production, consumption and disposal of plastics usually don't include the pricing of externalities). Nevertheless, that is how it's priced, and that is why it's not used by these companies by choice.
HFCS is largely used because of the corn lobby. The market price of sugar is 17 cents per pound. The price of one of these facial products ranges from $10 to $50, and they're typically about 8 oz, so about 5 cents if it were 50% sugar. Cost is not a significant factor. The total manufacturing cost of the beads including the equipment, testing, and branding probably makes them equivalent to sugar, or perhaps more expensive.
Most plastics are ridiculously cheap to manufacture. On the scale that the manufacturers mentioned operate, the costs of equipment etc. are quite small in comparison. And don't forget, with the sugar you still have the equipment costs etc. for refining it (granulated sugar doesn't grow on trees!). And branding it as "NaturalSucroseSuperBeads TM" still costs the same.
> Cost is not a significant factor.
Yes, for multi-nationals, it is. Increase that 5c for plastic to 6c for sugar, and that’s potentially a million or two off the bottom line for the company. That's how large companies work.
Also, if it's more expensive to use plastics for these products, why do you suppose they didn't use "NaturalSucroseSuperBeads TM" from the start? Perhaps they didn't think of it? Unlikely. If it really wasn't for cost reasons, then its likely for ease of production, product stability, or other such reasons.
I searched briefly and found a response from The Body Shop:
> This is a wider beauty industry issue and we, like many other global beauty brands, have been forced to use synthetic scrub particles for face products in the last few years as safety restrictions in some markets around the world have become more stringent. These safety restrictions require us to ensure that all scrub particles used on the face are consistently rounded in shape, which is difficult to achieve with natural particles. In order to provide a global product formulation that is stable and safe for use we have, unfortunately, had to resort to synthetic materials such as polyethylene.
I agree that there may be other reasons to choose plastic over sugar - companies don't generally do things that are bad for them - I was only disputing the disparity in the raw cost of the ingredients. Personally I've noticed that sugar based scrubs don't hold up as well, they tend to either dry out in the jar or get too wet. Fussy consumers who want life to look like a TV commercial are part of the problem here.
No, salt does work as a facial scrub. It does not dissolve because it is in a saturated solution (lots of NaCl, very little H2O). It's kind of fun to use because it scrubs for a while and then just disappears when you rinse with water.
You need to cruise through the skin care center of your local cosmetics/beauty/whatever store. If you put in only enough water to keep things moving, rather than creating an unsaturated solution, sugar and salt work very nicely.
Couple that with the added benefit of being water soluble, cleanup after using the product is especially easy. Scrub and rinse (and gently scrub) until you can't feel the product. It's self-documenting. :-)
Sometimes the plastic doesn't move through, causing animals to become stuffed with plastic. (http://pacificvoyagers.org/midway-atoll-the-plastic-plight-o...)
Good that manfs were quick to say that they'll remove micro-plastics from their products.