From cosmetics to your plate

I hope you know by now that, in a few months, toothpastes, shower gels, facial washes and scrubs containing tiny plastic granules will disappear from the shelves of stores. January 2018 is the end of an era and the cosmetics containing severely polluting ingredients will no longer be sold in the stores located in the Europe.

What makes them so bad?

The problem is that they are so small that the water purifying devices can't filter them out of sewage water and, therefore, they end up in freshwater bodies, lakes and oceans and finally into the digestive systems of the animals inhabiting them. In Germany alone, five hundred tons of slowly degradable plastic end up in the canals every year and, as a result, global cosmetic firms began withdrawing the products containing tons of cheap plastic from circulation. However, after long years of work, environmentalists managed to finally have such ingredients banned in Europe, which are listed as polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) and nylon amongst the ingredients of cosmetic products.

However, this is only part of the problem. Although it is definitely encouraging that fewer pollutants are being deposited in the water, the particles which are often too small to spot with the naked eye are spreading throughout the world. We are surrounded by plastic waste, threads of synthetic fabrics and tiny scraps of larger plastic items and they're here to stay with us for decades even though we're doing everything we can to ensure that less of this debris ends up in nature.

Plastic is everywhere, even in salt

The situation is becoming so dramatic that even sea salt used all over the world for dietary purposes contains plastic and unsuspecting people most likely consume dishes containing tiny bits of plastic day after day. Research was conducted on 16 different types of salt from eight countries. It transpired that a kilogram of salt can contain up to 10 tiny scraps of plastic. Only the French sample was free of such synthetic plastic and paint particles, while all the Portuguese, Australian, Malaysian, Iranian, Japanese and South African samples contained varying degrees of synthetic substances.

Although the researchers are doing their best to reassure all parties that the plastic swallowed is not harmful to human health, they also point out that such degradable plastic has no place on our plate or in the bodies of animals living along the shores.

Source: https://goo.gl/zuJuKn