Facial scrubs polluting Great Lakes with plastic | Hacker News Reader

Facial scrubs polluting Great Lakes with plastic

cbc.ca

99 pointsfraqed78 comments

> 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.

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.

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.

uh, of course they can, "ALL NATURAL CANE FLOWER CRYSTALS"

Sugar (or salt as was also proposed on this thread) are quite self evidently not a solution to be used in these products which contain water.

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.

Here's an example product:

http://www.origins.com/product/3829/10219/Bath-Body/Star-Col...

Working on boats and cars with my dad, we always cleaned up using sugar and dish soap. Never salt! Because it'd make those scraped knuckles sting! :)

Just get the marketing guys to make up something about the stinging letting you know that it's working. ;)

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. :-)

Really? Sugar scrubs are so soso very old. They predate the costemtics industry.

http://www.treehugger.com/organic-beauty/8-homemade-salt-and...

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.

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.

http://5gyres.org/posts/2013/04/26/get_plastic_off_my_face_a...

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.

Sugar is artificially expensive. It's the government's fault, via tariffs and production caps.

It's time to make the sugar barons eat dirt (but free of tiny plastic beads — that would be cruel and unusual).

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.

"remove by 2017."

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?

Two years. Only P&G said they'd stop by 2017, the others said 2015.

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.

It's just a particular kind of plastic that could be melted down and used for any purpose. There's no stockpile.

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.

> or coating it in something

Toothpaste and facewash?

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.

My uncle does supply chain for a major american cosmetics manufacturer, and it's pretty lean. There's few stockpiles, AFAIK.

Probably. But only a small stockpile. A large, multi-year stockpile would be financially suboptimal.

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.

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.

And it's a relatively short runway. Mercury, cadmium, lead and friends have taken and are taking decades to phase out.

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.

>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.

They've known about this for years, but only now they're committing to some kind of action.

The entire idea of making a product composed partly of plastic that's thrown into the sewer system is patently insane.

I don't think enough is being done to protect the Great Lakes. They are the largest source of fresh water in the entire world.

They've been over-fished, the industries of the surrounding area polluted the living hell out of them up until the 1970's, they've been invade by Zebra mussels and the water levels are at record lows. Places I swam as a kid don't even exist any more - the water has moved out a hundred yards from the old shore.

Protect them from what?

Idiotic comments like this.

No, I'm serious. None of the things he listed as observing are harmful to the lakes, they are just inconvenient for people.

How exactly, and what from, do they need to be protected?

Also: why the ad hominem? There was nothing idiotic about my simple question.

Stop downvoting and answer the question.

Protect the lakes from the sorts of abuses they suffered on a massive scale prior to modern environmental regulations were enforced, and from additional threats like microplastics, fertilizer run-off, sewage, contamination from watercraft, future outbreaks of invasive species transported by ocean-going shipping vessels, large-scale diversion for irrigation or urban water consumption, and a host of other things.

The way you asked it was like "What problems?" when it's obvious that a water-system that vast needs controls or it'll be abused and ruined for everyone.

You mean like these?

>over-fished, ... polluted the living hell out of them

Zebra mussels you might be able to claim damage the lake, but the complaints against them are certainly primarily based on nuisance, so I'll exclude them.

  Since zebra mussels became established in Lake Erie, 
  water clarity has increased from 6 inches to 30 feet 
  in some areas. … One drastic impact of the zebra mussel
  invasion is the near extinction of native American 
  unionid clams in Lake St. Clair and in the western 
  basin of Lake Erie.

http://www.glsc.usgs.gov/_files/factsheets/2000-6%20Zebra%20...

Lake Baikal is actually a bit bigger... 5700mi^3 versus 5400mi^3 for all the great lakes. It's a good bit smaller in surface area, but it's extraordinarily deep...over a mile in places.

Baikal has a volume of 23,615.39 km³, the Great Lakes is 22,671 km³ for those that use standard units.

I was going to say this too. Drove over it. Amazing place.

When I was a kid the big problem was the lake water rising (at least with Lake Michigan). I remember walking down what was left of an eroding lake front road, and seeing a bunch of septic tanks out in the water. That is where houses once stood.

They've been over-fished, the industries of the surrounding area polluted the living hell out of them up until the 1970's, they've been invade by Zebra mussels and the water levels are at record lows.

Fisheries adapted. Pollution has seen a massive decline. The zebra mussel...well that's nature, and as much as can be done about it has been done, but you can't really stop nature. As to water levels --

http://www.waterlevels.gc.ca/C&A/NetworkMeans2013.pdf

-- it's at a low ebb right now, but isn't at record lows at all. If you have memories of much higher levels, those were likely historic highs.

Plenty is being done for the Great Lakes. More can be done, but pointing back at the 70s doesn't demonstrate that things aren't being done today.

Unless you're calling dumping your ballast tanks "nature", no, zebra mussels are not nature. They're species contamination caused by people.

I think a lot of us are calling that nature.

> L'Oreal, the Body Shop and Johnson & Johnson all committed to phasing out plastic microbeads by 2015, and Proctor & Gamble said it would do so by 2017.

Unfortunately there's no mention if "phasing out" means production stops or if consumer sales stop. If the production line at PG is running till 2017 they could have tons of this stuff stockpiled for later sale that could take months or years.

With the associated cost of inventory. Unless the replacement formula is significantly more expensive, it doesn't make sense to have years of product sitting there collecting dust.

They themselves might not have years worth but it could take a while to flow through the supply chain, get off store shelves, and be out of consumer's hands.

For those of you inclined to a good skin grinding, an alternative is St. Ives Apricot Scrub. Made from biodegradable ground apricot cores. Also, it feels amazing. There are several off-brand mimics available.

Actually it's a small point but the exfoliate in Apricot Scrub is ground walnuts and corn meal. There is only apricot fruit extract in there.

Source: http://www.stives.com/Facial-Products/Fresh-Skin/Invigoratin...

Full Ingredients: http://www.walgreens.com/store/c/st.-ives-fresh-skin-invigor... Water , Juglans Regia (Walnut) Shell Powder , Glyceryl Stearate , Glycerin , Sodium Laureth Sulfate , Zea Mays (Corn) Kernel Meal , Cocamidopropyl Betaine , Cetearyl Alcohol , Cetyl Alcohol , PEG 100 Stearate , Prunus Armeniaca (Apricot) Fruit Extract , Cetyl Acetate , Polysorbate 60 , Ceteareth 20 , Acetylated Lanolin Alcohol , Carbomer , PPG 2 Methyl Ether , Phenethyl Alcohol , Triethanolamine , Methylisothiazolinone , Fragrance , Titanium Dioxide

Ah, nicely found! Interesting, I guess the apricot is only there for the scent.

According to St. Ives "Apricot Oil is known to hydrate and nourish the skin." Using fruit and other essential oils on the skin is a very very old practice. It might or might not have any actual merit to it. There is some science of the benefits of the topical application of at least one essential oil, tea tree oil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_tree_oil

Tea tree, Manuka, is so great. Grows fast, looks good, smells great, makes excellent fire wood and the honey is showing more and more interesting properties. I need to buy a few more!

This has been my favourite facial scrub for over 6 years, glad that it isn't a culprit in this issue.

Apparently St. Ives isn't the best thing for your face. "First, stop using St. Ives Apricot Scrub!!! The particles are large, non-uniform, sharp, and too abrasive to be suitable for facial use." from reddit.com/r/SkincareAddiction beginners guide (link below) I used that stuff at one point also. I haven't bought it in a while, I've just been using regular soap and then moisturizing after showering. I've been considering starting a routine like the reddit sub describes.

http://www.reddit.com/r/SkincareAddiction/comments/19oiyy/th...

One pseudonymous claim that it's bad for your skin isn't exactly the greatest citation.

If plastics absorb PCBs and pesticides, couldn't we use big (so they can't be swallowed), porous (to increase the surface) pieces of plastic to clean the water?

I think maybe this idea has floated around (no pun intended). There's a nice demo for teachers here : http://www.cmu.edu/gelfand/k12-teachers/polymers/polymer-and...

Ironically the plastic was polypropylene there too.

Don't use one toxin to clean up another.

Why not? The things can be removed from the water, and even if they weren't, there could still be a net benefit in having one toxin over another.

History is filled with examples of well-intentioned solutions like this going horribly awry.

Talk to an Australian about cane toads, for example. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia).

Maybe so, however that is a fully general counterargument that applies to any attempt to solve any problem ever.

Let's say you run a barber shop. You could always set the hair on the floor on fire, right? That'll clean it up! What could possibly go wrong?

...or maybe you could just sweep it up.

I had no idea! I've just checked my Gillette pre-shave scrub, and while nowhere on the packaging does it mention microbeads, on the contents it lists Polypropylene and Polyethylene. In the bin that goes then, and I won't be buying it again. Shame, I quite liked it.

It's more environmentally friendly if you use your current supply and not buy any more than if you just throw it away where it'll end up in the water supply in any case.

Debatable, if the contents are harming fish after use.

If the contents of his trash can are showing up in the water supply we have bigger problems than microbeads.

I never realized that the small beads in hygiene products was actually plastic. How many times have I ingested these over the years and if they are killing fish, what are they doing to my body?

I wonder how much pollution these are causing in smaller lakes and rivers?

Grey goo scenarios will start like this.

This is like the preview version of a grey goo crisis except with training wheels, where the particles are rendered inert and dead by the time they become pollutants, and don't actually self-replicate in the wild.

But the real thing will probably start with some stupid little innocuous product like this, and then explode and catch everyone by surprise in a very short amount of time, instead of this slow-burning sleeper pollution that takes decades to accumulate. (two full decades? was this stuff around in 1993?)

This is one thing I hate about most cleaning products. Whatever you're using, it eventually goes to a lake / something. Treatment is great and all, but if it's not designed to be broken down quickly by nature / the treatment, it stays in the lake. That drain cleaner? Meds? Micro-bead face cleanser? It all goes to the same place, often still intact (chemically speaking). And even if you don't add much, millions do, and it does add up.

It's enough to drive me to buy as many biodegradable / compostable products as possible. Now if only they weren't so crazy expensive...

So if it's so difficult to change all of these products - from soap to toothpaste - why not attempt changing how water-treatment plants work so that they do screen out floating matter?

I really applaud the companies' commitment to phasing out the plastic beads within a few years time.

dumb question... why don't they just put sand in this stuff?

What I don't understand is why anyone would want to rub their face down with BPA. My girlfriend makes and sells 100% natural face and body scrubs - sea salt, natural oils and bases, no additives. My skin has never been so good. Oh, and the ingredients are much cheaper than their synthetic equivalents.

I suppose it all comes down to shelf life. Decentralise or die.

Why is this on HN?

Perhaps because even the members of Hacker News live on planet Earth, and this sort of thing affects them, too?

The article is listed under the Technology & Science heading and deals with exactly those fields and the environment. In addition, the following key trigger words are present : pollution, plastic, research, science, scientists, PCBs, pesticides & money.

Therefore, it matches a Bayesian pattern of interest within the HN community.

Happy?

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