State bans personal care products with microbeads

INDIANAPOLIS – Indiana is following in the footsteps of several other states including New York and Illinois concerning synthetic plastic microbeads.

Manufacturers will no longer be able to produce personal care products with synthetic plastic microbeads beginning Dec. 31, 2017. One year later, retailers will not be able to sell personal care products containing microbeads.

The new law defines microbeads as a plastic particle less than 5 millimeters in its largest dimension, not biodegradable and intentionally added to a personal care product that is used to exfoliate or cleanse and is rinsed off the human body. Microbeads also are referred to as polyethylene in some of the product ingredient lists.

Although the microbeads have been used for several years, it wasn’t until 2012 that the first research began on the effects of the microbeads in the environment.

Jennifer McKay, policy specialist for the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council in Michigan, said scientists from the State University of New York and the 5Gyres Institute began sampling the Great Lakes to better understand plastic pollution.

“We’ve been using microbeads for a while but we didn’t actually start to recognize that it was a problem,” McKay said. “It was really their data that prompted awareness about the alarming levels of plastics, particularly microbeads in the great lakes.”

The bill’s author, Rep. Pat Bauer, D-South Bend, said he wrote the bill after going to a Great Lakes Commission meeting last fall.

“There’s an effort by the Great Lakes Commission that includes 10 states and three provinces in Canada to prohibit the use of microbeads that are mostly in our beauty products to exfoliate your skin and make your teeth whiter,” Bauer said.

Bauer said the bill passed unanimously, without any issues.

“There was very little opposition because the case against it has been built pretty well by scientists and by other related environmentalists about its danger to health and danger to the safety of our water ways,” he said.

The size of the beads makes it impossible to filter them with a waste water treatment system, causing them to end up in rivers and lakes and accumulate over time.

“They’re about the same size as fish eggs, so they look like food and fish such as yellow perch, turtles, and water fowl are unable to distinguish between food and microbeads,” McKay said. “Additionally, the petroleum in the plastic serves as a magnet for other pollutants such as some of the more traditional legacy pollutants we have in the Great Lakes.”

McKay said the microbeads absorb toxins and, when fish eat them, there is a potential for humans to consume fish contaminated with the toxins. “DDT and PCB and some of the other chemicals we know impacts endocrine systems and development, reproduction, etc.,” McKay said. “There are a lot of fish advisories for a lot of these chemicals already in the fish.”

McKay and Bauer said a lot of companies are already beginning to phase out the plastic microbeads.

“It’s a pretty easy bill to accept because there are alternatives. With the bill that Illinois passed, industries were in support of it,” McKay said. “There’s a lot of major companies: Johnson and Johnson, L’Oréal, Colgate that have actually already decided to voluntarily move away from beads and microbeads in their products.”

Alternatives to synthetic plastic microbeads include the use of apricot seeds, cocoa beans, sea salt, and other natural ingredients that are biodegradable.