Articulate Matter

So this vignette is based on personal shame and a fair amount of anger. It’s all due to that fact that I recently bought something called a sugar scrub. Basically just a nice, lemony-smelling exfoliant to smooth out my skin occasionally. Everything about the packaging emphasized “green/good/safe.” I don’t think that “natural” automatically means something is good for you (poison ivy is natural and I’m not about to rub that onto my skin), but I just assumed it would be fairly inoffensive and not harmful.

After using this product for a couple weeks, I finally got around to looking at the ingredients list. Guess what the second one was. Polyethylene, the same plastic used to make shopping bags.

This isn’t unusual. Check your own items. Many exfoliating products use polyethylene microspheres. They work well. They’re non-abrasive, apparently good for sensitive skin, and they’re inexpensive.

However, the mircobeads used in these exfoliants are generally too small to be filtered out by sewage treatments and because they don’t biodegrade the plastic bits are being sent right out into our oceans. As if the ocean garbage dumps weren’t bad enough, now we’re sending snack-sized plastic directly to zooplankton, barnacles, mussels, etc. And on it goes up the food chain.

Now here’s why I’m really ashamed of myself. I knew this already.

I’d read Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us a few years ago, and was struck by a section on plastics which elaborated on the fact that many exfoliants contain microspheres of plastic. The idea of sending tiny bits of plastic directly into the ocean horrified me, and I resolved not to purchase any such thing. And I didn’t… until now. So shame on me. I was lazy and took the cheerful, earth-friendly labeling at its word instead of looking at the reality which was spelled out right in front of me.

But shame on the companies that make this stuff too. I was going to name the specific product, but there are so many similar ones out there that I might as well use this little platform to scold them all: Congratulations. You’re actively despoiling the planet and killing off countless numbers of creatures, all the while spending lots of money seducing us with the idea that we even need your products. I hope you’re proud of yourselves. I’m going to try my damnedest to avoid giving you the pleasure of any more money from me.