Good for your face, bad for the fish

Plastic microbeads — some of them fractions of a millimeter long — have been found in water samples from lakes Superior, Huron and Erie. The California researchers who collected them plan to troll lakes Michigan and Ontario next.

The beads are abrasive particles found in everything from toothpaste to liquid hand soaps to industrial cleaners. Lather up, and they provide an invigorating scrub that unclogs pores, removes dead cells and reveals a sparkling new you.

But the beads don't dissolve. They're designed to wash down the drain — after which they make their way into the water treatment system and eventually to our lakes or oceans, where they remain for who knows how long. Worse, they absorb and retain chemical contaminants.

LINK (via:The Chicago Tribune)

To estimate how big a problem the beads might be, the researchers emptied an entire tube of Johnson & Johnson facial scribe Clean & Clear, put it through a sieve, and collected a tablespoon of white powder made up of microbeads. When they counted the beads, they amounted to about 330,000 per tube.

LINK (via:CBC News)

Great Lakes have some of world’s most concentrated plastic pollution

Plastic pollutants circulate in pockets of the Great Lakes at concentrations higher than any other body of water on Earth, according to a recent State University of New York study.

The study is the first to look at plastic pollutants in the Great Lakes.

“We had two samples in Lake Erie that we just kept going back and rechecking the data, because the count, the number of plastic particles in the sample, was three times greater than any sample collected anywhere in the entire world,” SUNY chemistry professor and project lead Sherri Mason said.

LINK (via: Great Lakes Echo)