California Governor Jerry Brown signed the nation’s toughest ban on personal care products containing plastic microbeads, such as toothpastes, soaps, and shower gels, that are designed to be rinsed down the drain.
Assemblymember Richard Bloom (D-Santa Monica) authored AB 888 after trillions of the tiny fragments of plastic ended up in rivers, lakes and oceans, where they are mistaken for food by fish and other wildlife.
AB 888 is sponsored by the California Association of Sanitation Agencies (CASA), Californians Against Waste, The Story of Stuff Project, The 5 Gyres Institute and Clean Water Action. According to CASA, after plastic microbeads are rinsed down the drain, their small size allows them to often bypass wastewater treatment filters. They then end up in local waterways and eventually the ocean where they attract chemicals such as PCBs and flame retardants to their surfaces. This can pose a threat to human health when fish and other organisms mistake them for food and the toxins make their way up the food chain.
Unlike plastic microbead bans passed in other states, AB 888 does not allow for companies to use microbeads that are made of new formulations of plastic that their producers claim are safe or “biodegradable” because such claims have not been scientifically proven.
A recent study by the San Francisco Estuary Institute found the San Francisco Bay has some of the highest concentrations of plastic pollution of any U.S. body of water, and a recent UC Davis study found a quarter of fish at markets have ingested plastic or other man-made debris. The 5 Gyres Institute, a research organization focusing on plastic pollution in the world’s oceans, discovered microbeads on a research expedition in the Great Lakes, where they found as many as 466,000 microplastics per square kilometer.
Plastic microbeads generally measure less than 1 millimeter in diameter and are added to facial scrubs, toothpastes and other personal care products as colorants or exfoliants. A single product can contain 350,000 microbeads. Many natural alternatives, such as apricot shells and cocoa beans, are already used instead of plastic microbeads in many products. AB 888 takes effect on January 1, 2020, and will keep an estimated 38 tons of plastic pollution out of California’s freshwater and marine environments every year.
Published in the December 2015 Edition of American Recycler News
