Microbeads—the tiny plastic spheres used as exfoliants in face wash, toothpaste and just about any other beauty products on the shelves—were a really, really bad idea. Our wastewater treatment plants aren’t designed to handle them, they don’t biodegrade and there are now a mind-boggling volume of microbeads winding up in all the wrong places.
A new analysis published this week in the journal Environmental Science and Technology estimates that 8 trillion microbeads are being emitted every day into aquatic habitats in the U.S. That’s enough tiny plastic spheres to cover more than 300 tennis courts, according to the researchers’ calculations. And yet, somehow, that’s only 1 percent of the total microbeads discharged each day.
http://www.newsweek.com/stop-using-microbeads-already-373975