I suspected that banning plastic microbeads in cosmetics was trivial, but I didn’t realise how trivial until I came across this graph.
If anybody would like to read 1000 pages of commissioned reports on the subject, the links are below. Just think what a difference we could make if these minds were put to a more pressing environmental issue.
Postscript: No, I haven’t read them all, because I’d rather read about something more important. But from what I skimmed through, the issue is obviously a bit more complicated than this graph suggests; it’s not easy to estimate numbers and so the data should really be presented with error bars. But an interesting snippet I read was that the EU is considering whether to reclassify tyre dust so that it is no longer considered to be a microplastic. What a genius way of making a problem disappear!
OK, so we know where they come from…but are they a problem? If so why?
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On the news, we see increasingly incidents of dead sea animals, that have starved to death because of ingesting ridiculous amounts of plastics and micro plastics in the ocean. Apart from affecting endangered animals and disrupting the animal kingdom’s balance, micro plastics also enter the food chain and consequently we eat them too. Ingested plastic is far from being healthy and just because there’s not enough research on the consequences, it doesn’t mean we should ignore this.
It makes sense why car tyres are the number 1 on the list by far: all that rain that washes off the streets and the sewers end up in the oceans without treating that waste water, it’s pretty much inevitable. I would account it as “city debris” too, which seems surprisingly low on the graph.
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