Saturday, 22 November 2014

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #361 Reject Products with Microbeads

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #361 Reject Products with Microbeads


Microbeads are tiny, tiny, tiny balls of plastic often used in personal care products such as facial scrubs and even toothpaste. They are too small to be caught in sewage filter systems and therefore end up in water systems. Lake Michigan in the United States has been found to contain large quantities of microbeads that have polluted its water. Once these beads are in the environment they cannot be removed. That’s pretty major, don’t you think?
So what happens is: you wash your face with a product containing microbeads that get washed down the drain. They don’t disappear, of course, they end up in the water system where they are gobbled up by fish and other marine creatures, and drunk in by birds and animals. You go and buy yourself some fish for dinner and whammo – microbeads in your system. Sound good? No, I thought not.
We need to stop these pieces of plastic from entering our environment. We can do this by refusing to purchase products that contain them. There is an app you can get for your smartphone that you can use to check if a product contains microbreads and there is a lot more information about the fight against these tiny but disastrous plastic beads at www.beatthemicrobead.org. There are natural alternatives so let’s get together to support the companies that are doing good things for the planet.

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