How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 084: Microbeads banned in the US
A huge win occurred recently where the US federal government banned Microbeads from all products by July 2017. This is a huge victory for the Ocean as Microbeads has some harmful effects on waterways and oceans around the world. Find out their effects and how many microbeads are introduced into waterways per day in the US by listening to the podcast.
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Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session84
Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue Podcast, session 84. Today on the episode, we're going to talk about another plastic item that has been banned for use. It's another victory in the fight against over usage of plastic and plastic getting into our oceans. So stay tuned to find out what that item is and how it got passed here on the Speak Up for Blue Podcasts. Stay tuned. Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue Podcast, helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now, here's your host, Love's Football So Much. I mean he really, really likes it. Andrew Lewin. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the Speak Up For Blue Podcast, your voice for the ocean. And I am your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of SpeakUpForBlue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean printer. That's right, everything I do as an entrepreneur, I do to protect the oceans and I do so that we can live for a better ocean. Thanks for tuning in today, I really appreciate for downloading the episode and for subscribing. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do so at iTunes or Stitcher and the links are on our website at SpeakUpForBlue.com, you can find those easily. Today, we're going to be talking about a victory, a plastic victory, and another item has been banned in the US, which is fantastic. There's been a lot of movement in the states, I live in Canada, but I've been watching this and it's kind of come up to Canada for a little bit and it kind of disappeared. But for a while, the US has been really on a point in terms of getting the public interested and aware of what's been happening in the ocean in terms of plastics. There are a lot of organizations out there like the Plastic Pollution Coalition, 5 Gyres, and others that have really kind of come to the brought plastic pollution to the mainstream. And I'm hoping to talk to some of them in an interview soon. But essentially, what they've done is they've really kind of come, especially with the plastic bags situation where we've seen a lot of states ban the use of plastic bags. San Francisco has won. A lot of states have gone back and forth depending on the culture and depending on the people who are in the legislation. But obviously the plastic bag industry does not like this. But either way, the nonprofits are going to have really been pressuring industries and to change their ways and governments to really put regulations into place to ban plastics. Well, another plastic has been banned, this time federally. Now, we're talking about microbeats. So these are the little plastic beads that are in your toothpaste, in your lotions, in your hand soaps, and a lot of different other beauty products where they're used as an adhesive. And they've been banned federally, but they were previously banned in California and Florida for their use. Now what microbeats do is like a lot of plastics, they actually get into the environment and they're there. Once they're in the environment, they break down, they start attracting other harmful toxic molecules and they start aggregating them. And then all of a sudden, this aggregation becomes very, very toxic. So they aggregate things like PCBs, which can be very, very toxic and are found in waterways from different pollutants that have been introduced through industries that have been, you know, emptying those out for years into harbors and whatnot. Now, most of the time now, PCBs have to be below a certain level and industries don't actually put them into the waterways anymore from most places. However, historical levels have actually made it pretty bad in a lot of places. So now, these plastic beads and other plastic materials actually attract these PCBs molecules and it actually makes them enhance and worse than ever. And one of the problems with microbeats is that they actually get, they don't get filtered out in the wastewater process. So when you dump all your crap out, no pun intended, down the sink, down the toilet and everything like that, down the drain, it goes to a wastewater treatment plant. And they have different filters to filter out all the kind of solid materials that don't belong there. A lot of plastics will go in there. Who knows what else? But these microbeats actually go undetected. So they actually go through the filter because they're so small, they're micro. They're very, very small, tiny molecules. So, or beads. So they actually get through there and they go into our waterways. So there's more and more introduced every day. And actually it puts, there's a chemist, Sherrie Mason, an environmental chemist at the State of University of New York in Fredonia, who estimates that 11 billion microbeats are released into the nation's water, into the US waterways each day. That's only in one country. It's 11 billion microbeats that go into the waterways. So that's just disgusting. That's just terrible. Now they're banned. Now companies are going to have to phase out of their products to microbeats by July 2017. Not fast enough, but at least it's getting there. We're about a year and a half away from that happening, which is fantastic. And the even better part is, is this what they called a lot of environmental environmentalists called this was the low hanging fruit. This was stuff that wasn't really opposed because microbeats have been, there've been a lot of pressure from nonprofit organizations such as like environmentalists, environmental nonprofit organizations, a lot of advocates have been advocating against the use of microbeats in a lot of products already and many companies have already promised to phase them out. So there was already a bit of a movement to get them out. So once this, this, this bill went to Congress, which, you know, usually stagnant and Congress or stagnant government have been very synonymous in the last little, in the last four years. They've been able, this bill was actually passed through Congress with, with very little objection. And in the Senate, it was unanimous. They didn't even change the wording. So we're happy that the fact that this microbe went in so quickly and it was such low hanging fruit, but think about it. Now you're taking away 11 million, 11 billion microbeats away from the waterways. That is a huge, huge victory for, for the, for the ocean, for the speaker, for the nation, just for everybody that is involved and it went by pretty easily and through a government that wasn't passing anything easily at all. So I'm glad that this happened and, and I hope that this happens in the future and it just goes to show that if you put pressure on government and on industry, positive pressure, you're starting, you let everybody know the problems that are occurring with, say, something like a microbeat and what it can, what can it do? And then what would happen if companies started to phase it out? You present a case to get rid of these microbeats and it can do it well. It may not happen right away, but the solution might actually be implemented faster than you think and easier than you think. This was years and years of work of a lot of different organizations that were trying to, you know, grind down the industry, grind down the government to really open their minds to this kind of stuff and it was done very well and it was, it was, I would say, it's a success because in the U.S. this is going to happen. Hopefully Canada will follow in other countries as well. We'll follow and say, we don't need microbeats in our beauty products. We don't need micro, microbeats in any of our products to be honest. They're just not necessary anymore. We can find an alternative and I'm sure that's what they have found. So this is a big victory. I'm really happy that we've actually had this. So I'm not really going to talk more about it because that's the end of the show for today. But just thank you for all the organizations that went about getting microbeats, getting the microbeats banned and now into law federally, not just by every state. Plus the thing about if you get banned federally, all the states will ratify it. I think it'll be, it'll be a lot quicker process than trying to convince, you know, a number of different state governments that these are, that microbeats are bad. So hopefully this will just kind of go into a place nice and quietly that people will just go through it. So, and go with it. So anyway, that's the show for today. It's a real big, happy one. So I hope you enjoy your Wednesday. You've been listening to Speak of a Boot podcast. I am your host Andrew Lewin. Happy Wednesday. Bye bye microbeats. Happy conservation. [MUSIC]