Any-Mom » What Your Facial Scrub is Doing to the Environment

What Your Facial Scrub is Doing to the Environment

11.10.2008 | Author: OrganizerMom | Posted in Our Bodies, Our Selves

I’m reading an incredibly well-researched book called “The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman. It’s also an alarming book in that it uncovers ways in which humans have changed our environment, usually for the worse. One part that particularly stuck with me was about a seemingly innocuous product, a small plastic resin micropellet known as a nurdle. Nurdles are typically under 5mm in diameter and are formed as a raw material or are ground down from larger plastic elements.

Something that small can’t possibly be harmful to the environment, can it? According to British marine biologist Richard Thompson, (as reported in Weisman’s book) it can. He studied 40 years of water samples taken around the British Isles and discovered that the incidence of plastic in the ocean tripled from the 1960’s to the 1990’s. Most disturbing was that the samples had been taken at a depth of 10 meters rather than at the surface, where most plastic floats, indicating that they had measured just a portion of the true amount of plastic swirling in our seas. Worse, the grinding action of waves against shorelines reduced the particles to a smaller and smaller size, and finally into a powder. Smaller particles means that smaller organisms can ingest them. Thompson ran an experiment where he fed appropriately-sized plastic particles to lugworms, sand fleas, and barnacles, each of which consumed them. Smaller particles passed through the digestive tracts but larger ones stuck to the intestines to cause fatal constipation.

Plastic does not biodegrade; Thompson and his team estimate that plastic particles will be around for thousands of years. Also problematic is that plastic absorbs harmful toxins from everyday items like copy paper and fluorescent lights. Animals that ingest these chemical-laden plastics will suffer unknown effects from the release of these poisons. Pre-1970 PCB-injected plastic (polychlorinated biphenyls, much of which is still floating on our oceans, is known to cause hormonal disorders in fish and polar bears.

So what does this mean for you, the average person living your life and minding your own business? After all, you aren’t the one dumping nurdles into the ocean. Except that you are, if you are using any of the new facial scrubs like Neutrogena’s Deep Clean Gentle Scrub. I was seduced into buying this and abandoning my old standby, St. Ives Apricot Scrub, by a commercial with a young glowing woman who applied the gentle microbeads to her already flawless skin, washing away a busy day’s worth of blackhead-causing dirt and oil while simultaneously exfoliating dull, dead surface skin to reveal healthy, fresh skin below. That’s right, nurdles have found their way into facial scrubs.

Anything called a microbead is suspect. In the ingredients listing, look for anything with the word polyethylene in it. Polyethylene is plastic; avoid it. For myself, I’ll be going back to my tried-and-true St. Ives, which relies on ground up walnut shells for its exfoliating properties. I can’t stem the production of 250 billion pounds of nurdles annually, but I can keep them out of my shower.

Read the Book:

Learn More:
http://nonurdles.com/
http://earthfirst.com/many-face-scrubs-contain-tiny-water-polluting-beads-of-plastic/
http://www.slate.com/id/2193693/