US to ban soaps and other products containing microbeads
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Exactly. But having to put such things on the label is a failure. We pay taxes so that the government can set up agencies ensuring, by means of regulation, that what we can legally buy is environmentally ok. If we have to worry if our face creams are bad for the environment, someone is not doing their job.
I'd say I'm a pretty average person so I don't think the masses had a clue about microbeads.
What I believe and hope is that if the masses did know about this, the market would have reacted and forced action.
[1]: http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate...
Most people are not at all aware of microbeads.
Most people know they are supposed to recycle, but are unable to comprehend the negative consequences of not doing it.
It's even harder for people to be aware of their carbon footprints and the consequences of global warming. It never enters the brain of anyone I know that they might be increasing their footprint by flying. And they could tell you by what percent, even approximately, if you asked them.
You know and still fly. I literally feel nausea when I think about what I do when I fly, but I still do it to make my family happy. If anyone is behaving criminally you and I may be among the worst.
I was just trying to rebut the initial comment that this proves the market couldn't solve this.
I don't necessarily have an answer, but I am just saying, if the market isn't even aware, how could they even act?
Guess I'll go find a new brand of face soap.
The tragedy of the commons is somewhat distinct to regulation of things which directly cause harm (in the extreme example, murder) which we generally don't consider to be part of the 'free market'.
There are many shared resources that are easily exploitable by the free market. A central authority can create artificial markets on that resource to combat the exploitation by the free market, but it's still being heavily regulated which is not a free market characteristic.
One example of this is carbon credits with global warming, another is the Alaskan tradeable fishing quotas. Even following the common example of the Pilgrims, it was the enforcement of property regulations that solved the free-market exploitation of the land.
SOX and NOX markets as well. Carbon markets (as they exist), not so much, but mostly because of completely insane equivalencies baked in, and weird credit schemes.
In fact, free market socialists see property rights on any productive property as skewing markets to favor the owners, which leads to wealth disparity and disproportionate ownership, making it not a free market. We see that today with free-market capitalism and the top 1%, which is why we have social welfare programs in place to redistribute wealth.
Most arguments that the free market can handle these problems start out with the recommendation that the resources involved (rivers, lakes, ocean) should be privatized. Economist Walter Block and others have written about ways this could be done. To fault free market arguments for not working when the waterways aren't privatized is to misrepresent the arguments. Most people aren't arguing that the free market is going to solve problems relating to unowned, unownable, or government owned property without first recognizing private property rights in those resources.
Governments often protects polluters by limiting their liability. If that were changed, and assuming these resources (bodies of water) were privatized so non-governmental parties had standing to sue, if you have an argument why a class action lawsuit or something like that can't handle these problems, then that would be an interesting comment. But just saying the free market doesn't solve problems where there are no property rights is rather uninteresting, because free marketers agree with that.
Also it's pretty amusing that a failure of government (who owns the waterways, and most of the sewer systems) to solve this problem sooner somehow gets twisted into a failure of the free market (who doesn't own these resources). Without property rights there's no free market.
I agree that governments, who subsidize animal feed, water, land, and waste, and prosecute activists, do a great deal of harm to the environment by promoting and protecting animal exploitation. I'm fine with banning animal exploitation, even on private property, and I see that as no more anti-free market than banning slavery on private property.
A market solution would allow a fisherman to catch below quota and be rewarded in later years by replenished stocks in the waters he controlled.
This is a problem with some of those quotas - they're not being set up right. That's the failure of democracy though, not of central planning per se.
> A market solution would allow a fisherman to catch below quota and be rewarded in later years by replenished stocks in the waters he controlled.
That may work, in a type of business with big inertia (i.e. where you can't go out of business over a single season), if we could parcel water like that. Sadly, fish colonies don't respect arbitrary lines we draw on maps. I don't know if such a market solution is ecologically possible; fish need space, and they often need to travel.
What if I buy a 1 meter by 1 meter parcel of the ocean and charge bottom of the barrel prices to dump industrial waste in it? What if that square of ocean was 100 meters off shore from a beach in Los Angeles? If you don't want that then we're right back to government regulations.
Fishing quotas that are enforced by regulatory bodies are what still prevent it from running rampant within the waters of said organizations.
The free market does not just mean "anarchy! take everything!" There's no market here!
If you're resorting to arguing the semantic meaning of Free Market, then it is definitively "an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses."
With natural resources, the free market is certainly an unrestricted first-come first-serve market. Fishing quotas are restricted competition and price influential, which makes it not a free market, despite your attempts to redefine it as such to fit a narrative.
There's certainly merit in trying to make people pay for externalities (offsetting carbon pollution for example), but you can't do that for everything. Privatizing everything might be an appealing free-market pipe dream, but unless we can completely/mostly stop externalities from happening, such an experiment would be a disaster.
An unregulated free market is a terrible idea. It ends in massive monopolies and natural resource destruction at an absolute level.
It's not a bad thing that that's what a free market moves towards, per se, but that's why it needs to be and is regulated. Any worthwhile conversation isn't about whether or not to regulate it, it's a what level.
Economists that believe everything can be sorted out in the free market are pretty fringe.
You can't take your wealth with you upon death -- Property owners of valuable resources nearly always maximize exploitation in the short term and could give a shit about the long term.
If they took a long term view, we'd still have old growth forest in the US.
The statement was heavily sarcastic.
Not caring for the long term is still a massive problem for our civilization. I don't know if that has anything to do with privatization. I'm very skeptical that governments or voters care more about the long term than private markets. At least individuals care about leaving money for retirement. And even if you don't care, it's still senseless to deprecate your assets' value more than you gain from exploiting it.
They wouldn't completely own them, they'd have property rights in them. Depending on how the property rights are structured you could have many owners of say a lake or a river.
> Those private entities would rationally take a long term vision
If there's anything we know about politicians up for re-election in two years or unable to run for another term it's that they take a long-term approach to problems. /s
Your faith is weak. If your opinions were subject to a Free Market, we could solve this problem.
Smart people with the public good and long view can, however, do better in public policy that sets limits on wreckless actions.
If you want to see what happens when people don't give a shit look at China where Beijing recently had to close schools for several days because of the pollution.
This doesn't necessarily follow. Private ownership can be structured as something other than for profit. Non-Profit Land Trusts are big thing in many areas of the US for example. But even industry motivated groups might be a choice. Think a home-owners association of beach property owners (including resort hotel conglomerates) or fishing rights cooperatives. If either had stronger property rights and standing to remedy damages they would be motivated by longer term aims to ensure water quality. You might be right that this could have adverse consequences but I wanted the raise the possibility of options other than BigWaterCo.
If there's anything we know about politicians up for re-election in two years or unable to run for another term it's that they take a long-term approach to problems. /s
The other explanation is that the premise is wrong.
If the free market doesn't work together with anything that isn't organized as a free market then it's a flaw of the free market system. There always will be things that aren't a free market.
1. Property rights exist and are enforced. 2. There are minimal barriers to entry. 3. Transaction costs are low.
(#2 is of less interest here.)
The classic market failures all involve a violation of one of these. The tragedy of the commons is a property-rights failure, monopolies are a barrier-to-entry failure, and lots of other miscellaneous exploitation and big-corporate-player centralization issues are related to transaction-cost issues.
In this case, it's quite clear that property rights do not exist and are not enforced on things like the Atmosphere or the Ocean (good luck doing that internationally), and even if they did, imagine the transaction costs of tracking exactly how much in microbead pollution a given person has flushed down the drain? Anyone crying 'free market solution!' is being quite silly.
What would prevent someone from, say, buying up all the water and then not selling any of it, or selling just a little to a handful of rich people?
What would happen to the rest of the people who couldn't afford any water?
If the barrier to entry were lower, another company would form to sell cheap water at high volume.
First, no one has enough money to buy up all of the water. Second, even if they did, it wouldn't make sense not to sell it. Most people like making a profit and having more money. It wouldn't make sense to only sell it to wealthy people, because they don't use enough more water to exhaust supply in most places people inhabit and they'd be forgoing a lot of profit from selling water to normal people. Also governments also often sell water to politically connected business and agriculture groups at a lower rate than they sell to normal people.
If someone owned all the water, they would have not just profit-making potential, but they would have a lot of power. In particular, they would have the power of life and death over virtually everyone on the planet.
In a free market utopia, these people could kill as many people as they liked by simply refusing to sell them water, and believers in a completely free market wouldn't lift a finger to stop them -- because, after all they're just freely doing what they like with their own property.
The world is full of people with malicious motives. The prisons are full of them, and there are plenty more outside of prison. Wars, ethnic cleansings, and genocides have killed people by the millions. Some of this was done for profit motives, but some done for other motives.
Don't for a moment think that people like that would hesitate to use the power in their hands to harm those they hated or wanted dead for whatever reasons of their own.
Then there the sociopaths, who would let others die simply because they think giving them water would be worth their bother, or maybe because they were just more interested in other things.
Also, you don't have to buy up all the water in the world to be able to wreak havoc. All the water in a particular water-scarce region might be enough.
Of course, water is just an example and an analogy. The fact is that free market believers have very little to nothing except faith in the free market that would prevent the concentration of wealth and power (in whatever form) and the subsequent abuse of such at the whims of those who wield it.
I've read the same authors you've read on the subject (believe me, I hear you, and I have made the same arguments you're making more times than I can count). I was for many years a libertarian (big L and little l...card-carrying member of the party, worked for ballot access, etc.). I just don't believe in the premises of libertarianism any more. At least, not the free market uber alles part of those premises.
Also, I can't reconcile the idea of unlimited capital accumulation in the hands of a few that spans generations (e.g. land, water access, etc.) in a world of limited resources with my own beliefs about fairness, justice, and human freedom.
What took you so long?
And, I think dismissing libertarianism out of hand, as though it has no interesting/valuable ideas, is somewhat silly. The LP was literally decades ahead of the curve on LGBTQ rights, ending the war on drugs, and opposition to war (of all sorts). All at a time when those ideas were extremely unpopular in mainstream politics. I disagree with the premises behind their economic policy ideas, but it doesn't mean I don't understand the allure of the non-aggression principle (I just think they're mistaken about capitalism being free of aggression).
So, how about you? What took you so long to come to your views? Why weren't you born with the correct ideas on every issue? Or were you? You reckon you're right on everything now? How embarrassing it'll be when you find out in five years you were wrong about something today.
Given that you ask, my views on these things seem to be very similar to yours today, based on what you've written here. I've considered myself a small-l libertarian for most of my life. I think the difference is that I've never found the ideological purity of big-L Libertarianism very attractive.
That's why I asked the question. I really would like to understand what it takes to convince someone who buys into the Libertarian party line to embrace ideas like basic income, and to realize that privatizing everything simply will not result in the outcomes they think it will. I wonder if it's possible to convince them without their having had the kinds of life experiences you have had.
I think that libertarian ideas and libertarian activists could be a effective force for reform in this country--if only the most motivated (people like you who are motivated enough to work on things like ballot access) were willing to make the kinds of ideological compromises and embrace the kinds of ideas (like basic income) that could make libertarianism more broadly appealing.
The answer to what it takes to change minds on any subject?
Not taking a tone of "you're clearly an idiot". I do it all the time (particularly on issues I'm passionate about, like the horror that is animal agriculture), but it doesn't convince anyone, it just puts them on the defensive. And humans have somewhat broken brains such that defending a position makes one believe that position more strongly and more fiercely (even if it is demonstrably ridiculous; e.g. anti-vaccine folks).
Convince them to get outside of their comfort zone. Travel, activism, and volunteering, is what did it for me. Activism and volunteering probably need to be with and on behalf of folks unlike oneself to have any impact.
Ask questions rather than arguing. If someone discovers the uncomfortable points of their position on their own, they'll be willing to change their mind. One of the founders of CFAR (Center for Applied Rationality) once asked me a few questions that may have even planted the seeds of my change of heart when we happened to meet in NYC...specifically, she asked about the source of property rights, since I don't believe in gods, so I can't simply handwave it away as a " god given right". That stuck with me, because it's clear to anyone who is sincere that property is merely a fiction we all agree on, and it is a fiction that can be taken to unhealthy extremes. Asking the right questions is harder than ranting, but it actually works to change opinions, and serves to keep the conversation on a level of friendly chat rather than two ideologues bloviating.
And that's, maybe, all I know about that.
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
As an environmentalist and libertarian, I can't stress enough how government is more often than not a partner in crime when it comes to polluters. One of the big reasons places like China are so polluted is the advance of industry is considered to part of the common good. Therefore, the polluters are given immunity and protected by the political system - giving no recourse for regular citizens.
Here's some more reading on that: https://mises.org/library/libertarian-manifesto-pollution
What forms of recourse would citizens have against polluters without government intervention?
I hope you're not going to suggest 'they can shop elsewhere' as it's been proven time and time again that most citizens don't choose what they buy based on the greater good.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/29/supreme-cou...
So the arguments are lunacy. Gotcha.
Any solution that does not implement the above is a 'post-filter' approach which can result in permanent, irreversible damage to a system.
Even if we accept your post-filter scenario (which is not rational from a system design perspective), your 'privatize common resources' suggestion relies on the erroneous idea that public property rights are not equivalent to private property rights from a legal perspective.
Either type of right can be reduced to a legal right which gives the rightsholder standing to take legal action. Whether a rightsholder enforces those rights is simply a matter of whether the rightsholder is competently managing those rights, and both public and private entities can be good and bad at this.
In a situation where there are shared resources used by all actors in a system the simplest and logical solution is to have one entity which represents all actors managing those resources.
Your suggestion of transferring ownership / management of shared resources to a narrow subset of beneficiaries seems unavoidably complex, convoluted and illogical to me, having surveyed various arguments online for 'privatize all the things'.
What is the best resource you'd cite online? I've reviewed Walter Block and to be honest he seems like a total lunatic, but that won't necessarily stop me evaluating his arguments.
I just don't want to read a 494 page book on privatizing roads to get the gist of his arguments.
I'm no expert on water privatization. I know a few economists have written about it, but it's unrealistic to expect them to come up with a great solution on their own. A good solution would have to evolve over time with decisions by judges etc.
AFAIK most proposals don't have a single entity owning a river, but rather people own rights to a certain amount of water from the river at a certain quality.
I wasn't referring to Walter Block's book on roads, but this one: "Water Capitalism: The Case for Privatizing Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, and Aquifers." I haven't read it.
Isn't that pretty similar to how things work now, minus the quality part?
Corruption.
Either that, or you need to use the tax system to internalize the externalities. (Think carbon tax or London congestion charge.)
So yes, I agree that this is a failure of government. The government should be a lot more zealous in protecting the value of all the natural resources that it claims for itself, perhaps even more so than private landowners.
For example, if a forest is privatised and cut down the owner might be acting in their best (market) interest, but people living nearby will be negatively affected.
We could try and put a price on these negative effects, but it's very difficult so the better solution is normally to keep things private.
Essentially, you're arguing the solution to one set of externalities is to privatise, but that very privatisation will create a whole host of even worse externalities.
We see with climate change and carbon emissions that ensuring companies pay for their externalities (pollution) is very difficult post the event because there are strong vested interests against this, and the people affected negatively are many but spread out, there is little incentive on an individual level for them to go to the vast effort to fight against the polluter.
In economics, this is called "internalizing the externalities". There is a good mechanism that works very well, it's taxation. Instead of taxing productive things people do, tax the polluting things.
Also, the most polluted countries in the world tend to be the ones with centrally planned economies. There's nothing inherently environmentally conscious about central planning.
1. there are always uses of something that makes sense, and may contribute only insignificant downsides. Getting a regulatory exception is slow and expensive.
2. they produce revenue for the government, whereas banning is a cost sink
There are also many anarcho-socialist branches, which obviously see plenty of wrong with the State, preferring to do away with it; and even among the statist, many would tell you that the current capitalist states must be done away to bring a real solution.
After all, it was Marx who wrote "The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery".
This is a good regulation/law, and it's actually going to be passed. Glad it still happens sometimes.
Incandescent bulbs are just a better experience for me right now. I don't think there are any such advantages for microbeads.
Of course, it turns out that even though they have great dimmer compatibility, they're not 100% compatible with my magnetic dimmers. I have to trim them to 80% of peak; if I try to run them over 80%, the transformer resets and the bulb turns off. Sometimes they strobe for a few seconds when they're running at max brightness, I haven't solved that issue yet.
So unless I want to replace every transformer at ~$60 a pop or more (plus labor costs if not doing it yourself), plus likely a bunch of switches.. It's either $100 per bulb to go LED, or suffer with not-quite-perfect replacements.
http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/print/volume-9/issue-6/... http://www.lutron.com/en-US/Education-Training/Pages/LCE/Dim...
I know what you mean though. It'd be nice if there was some way to adjust them to change the brightness curve to match what you'd expect. It's one reason I'm considering something like the Phillips Hue bulbs instead of dimmers in the future despite the cost difference.
My current apartment came with CFLs and a dimmer switch. They work well with the dimmer. It's a pretty new building though, so perhaps the switch was designed with them in mind. It might be worth looking at new switches to see if they help with LEDs.
Not to mention that the CFL bulbs are poisonous and contain mercury. If they break, they're hazardous.
She did eventually catch on to me, but fortunately the event convinced her to reconsider her opinion.
My experience with LED bulbs is that it's hard to find anything as bright as halogens. (I live in an apartment where the main light source takes candelabra-base bulbs, sigh.) They also have super dodgy power supplies and if I put too many on the same circuit the RFI causes my carbon monoxide detector to go off!
I also haven't found any with both a daylight color temperature and a decent CRI. I would like to be able to look at my ColorChecker passport and see the same colors as on my calibrated display. As it stands now if I want to see what color something is in my apartment, I take a picture, apply the profile corrections, and look at it on my monitor!
Any suggestions?
You can't get incandescents anymore in the UK, and I've just bought some halogens in the same form factor. 25× more expensive upfront, but even nicer light.
I am interested in your general question though. My Cree TW have passable colored light, but are just too damn anemic both temperature and intensity. I'm thinking of augmenting with some higher intensity non-CRI-optimized LEDS.
(Of course, it's more complicated than partisans might prefer, given that the incandescent ban was supported/sponsored by at least some GOP lawmakers and that when they retook Congress the GOP's efforts to repeal the ban were pro forma at best. But it's still completely true that pushy nanny-state types, of either party, told people to get rid of their light bulbs.)
Of course they had to go and ban the only useful light source available.
Yeah I got an LED, because I wanted to test it because they are supposed to be the future. Turns out it is really huge (much bigger than the one I replaced) so it will only fit in some of my lamps and it is extremely yellow. Still that beats the one I tried before, which wasn't able to light anything after the sun had gone down and had such a white color it made everything look like a morgue.
In theory I am supposed to save money and improve the environment, but I have wasted a lot of money buying not good enough bulbs that were far more expensive than real bulbs and I got a car so that ruins the environmental savings times twenty.
If instead of being nanny staters they had put a tax on CO2, that might incentives me to drive slightly less, which would save much more CO2.
I love the LED bulbs because I have my workshop, an area in my garage, my laundry room and my walk-in closet all with LED bulbs as I never turn them off.
One of the tenants of a reasonably modern mechanical engineering curriculum is at least passing coverage of 'product lifecycle', which basically means thinking about disposal/recycling during design. What did the CPG companies think was going to happen when they dumped a billion tiny little pieces of plastic directly down the drain?
They clearly thought it wasn't their problem.
I'm starting to wonder if the title is even worth arguing over anymore.
Look at how nobody's broken omerta on what actually happened in VW.
- development cooks up 20 different solutions, some of them containing plastic microbeads
- plastic microbeads work better than no additive
- plastic microbeads have the same performance as <alternative>
- report concludes: "we clearly should pick <alternative>, due to similar performance and lower pollution"
- management massages report: "we clearly should pick plasic microbeads since it performs equal to <alternative> and is cheaper"You'd think it'd be mandatory for every lab to have those special sinks. It may even be, but she tells me everybody is afraid of speaking up about that and various other safety protocols because they don't want it to affect their employment. Even if they did say something, it'll probably get stopped at management and nothing will every come of it.
And she's a biomedical engineer and works with a lot of dangerous viruses both from humans and animals. So it's not just drugs that are getting put into the water sadly.
It's a shame that a company like that takes no responsibility and it's horrible that there's nothing in place to make sure they do.
I'm willing to put part of the blame on the cities for this one. In many cities, wastewater treatment has not been given the necessary investments to properly filter the water before piping it into the lake. Plastic's not the only problem, unfortunately.
Properly treated wastewater is just that - treated, to make it safe (i.e. fewer pathogens). It's still not something you'd want to drink out of a tap.
Rather than filter, why not settle them out?
Having to store an entire storm's worth of water long enough for 10 micrometer beads to filter out simply isn't feasible.
About a decade ago, developing a proposal for solving that problem in Kingston, ON was part of my first-year engineering coursework. Obviously, I was not an expert, but after some research, my conclusion was that building storage was the cheapest solution in the short term. Opportunistically separating the sewers made the most sense over the long term.
Stokes' Law gives settling times (or terminal velocities) for small spherical particles. Terminal velocity is proportional to (difference between particle density & water) * (particle diameter ^2)
A 0.1mm microbead at 0.9 specific gravity will float to the top at 0.54mm/s, or at 1.1 specific gravity will drop to the bottom at the same speed. A 1mm microbead will move 100x as fast. A 0.01mm microbead will move 1% as fast.
I don't see the technical issue with trying to incorporate them into settling plant workflows, only the sociological issue that we routinely underfund municipal works. It's much cheaper to ban the selling of microbeads than to deal with them via settling in a universe where engineers run everything and the environment is sacrosanct, but even so, we don't live in that universe: Raw sewage discharges are common, and such things are not seen as important so long as we're not getting cholera outbreaks. Municipal works don't have the power, political or regulative, to levy new taxes on specific consumer-good industrial practices to pay for any expansion.
Food for thought: "there are 330,000 plastic beads in a single bottle of Clean & Clear facial scrub"
Edit: From a student study of microbeads, it looks like sizes have a mean of 260um with a standard deviation of 100um. http://nature.berkeley.edu/classes/es196/projects/2013final/...
Instead they end up suspended in the oceans of the world and fish eat them and slowly die.
No idea how this became legal. Our regulatory body should be a whole lot more about transparency, so questionable stuff like this can be easily weighed by the consumer.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/0...
Though the crap that is ok to put in the food supply is ridiculous. http://sagewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Renew-Downlo...
"Do you use Crest toothpaste?"
I answered yes and was informed that some of the plastic beads from the tooth paste had gotten stuck in my gums. The dentist went on to explain that she'd sent in many complaints to the company but they still didn't drop that ingredient.
What weighs on my mind now is why a toothpaste company continued to use microbeads after learning of the externality. Did they have too much inventory to sell. Were they afraid that discontinuing that exact product would upset customers? Did they think that owning up to the mistake and correcting it would draw too much attention to the mistake?
Personally, my respect lies with any entity that can own up to and correct its mistakes before it is forced to do so.
it's not cheap but a little bit goes a long way. i use pea-sized amount.
The beads absorb some chemicals, and so they're not inert by the time they're eaten.
It may be a good idea to not run the experiment of "what happens when we coat marine life with a lot of plastic beads" because it could be really expensive to clean up if we find out it's bad later on.
1) Density. Sand and dust settle out. Plastic has a lower or similar density to water, so will collect at the surface or float in the water column.
2) Structure and surface properties. Plastic is hydrophobic and usually not completely solid--it is more of a sponge at the microscopic level. This means it can adsorb and absorb oils, which in turn can absorb biologically active chemicals from the water, effectively concentrating them.
This basically means that small organisms at the lower end of the food chain can end up ingesting these, including all the nasty stuff, and these cause problems up the food chain, either by killing or reducing the turnover of the lower organisms, starving the higher organisms of nutrition, and also by concentrating the toxins up the food chain.
> Nurdles that escape from the plastic production process into waterways or oceans have become a significant source of ocean and beach plastic pollution. Marine life is severely threatened by these small pieces of plastic: the creatures that make up the base of the marine food chain, such as krill, are prematurely dying by choking on nurdles.[7] Nurdles have frequently been found in the digestive tracts of various marine creatures, causing physiological damage by leaching plasticizers such as phthalates. Nurdles can carry two types of micropollutants in the marine environment: native plastic additives and hydrophobic pollutants absorbed from seawater. For example, concentrations of PCBs and DDE on nurdles collected from Japanese coastal waters were found to be up to 1 million times higher than the levels detected in surrounding seawater.[8]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_particle_water_pollu...
The problem is that microbeads are new to the ecosystem, and no species larger than a bacterium has yet adapted to suddenly having a lot of anthropogenic plastic particulates around.
How people aren't able to be put in jail for this kind of idiotic stuff in the first place I'll never understand. Our priorities in our legal system don't really accommodate the destruction that can be caused by normal everyday products at scale.
What I don't understand is, they get the profit, everyone else clean their shit. And they can get away with this? Sigh
Can't say I've ever seen any, other than the normal anti-science, stuff is 'scary' point.
That alone annoys me with this conversation, how about starting with a real reason this is bad rather than we can track it.
I am not saying that you are wrong, just that your argument can apply to literally every inventions humans have made, ie it proves too much.
But but chemicals!