by Vladimire Herard
in the face of research, lawsuits, national and international regulatory reform, business practice changes and media coverage, an emerging class of plant-and oil-based tiny materials are replacing microbeads as greener and equally effective ingredients in cosmetics and personal care item cleansers.
Bamboo powder, beeswax, bio-glitters, clay, corn or tapioca starch, jojoba beads or wax, rice bran wax, seaweed, silica and other such plant-and-oil-based materials in exfoliants, scrubs and soaps have been found to be more environmentally safer and just as efficacious as the controversial microbeads.
Microbeads are known as additives to cosmetics and personal care products that are five millimeters or less, made with solid plastic and can be used to unclog pores or clean or exfoliate skin, faces, teeth or any other part of the human body.
They are made with synthetic plastic fibers known as polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PPE) and polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA).
Additionally, microbeads are used in other consumer, drugs and farm products. This includes plastic packaging for food and nonfood products, cigarettes, car tires or synthetic fibers.
When used cosmetically, they were disposed of in the kitchen or bathroom drain or toilet and, through the wastewater management process, end up in and polluting lakes, rivers, seas, streams and oceans locally, nationally and globally.
Marine life such as fish and other sea animals would see the microbeads and mistake them for food, an environmental danger. Meanwhile, research never found that they pose a threat to human health.
Microbeads were once contained in facial washes, over-the-counter drugs, shower gels, soaps and toothpaste to scrub body parts, faces and teeth but, over the course of the millennium, they are no longer because of their negative impact on the environment.
Their alternatives work well to cleanse parts of the human body. Additionally, unlike microbeads that take weeks to biodegrade, the alternatives take hours or days to do so.
Since 2014, the cosmetics and personal care items industry publicized and pulled products containing microbeads from its business store and facility shelves around the world as research, policy and government and commercial conferences found that the micro-plastics, along with nanoplastics from bottled water, polluted the world’s waterways.
In mid-December of 2015, Congress amended the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act by passing the Microbead-Free Waters Act, which then-President Barack Obama signed to ban the production of products made with microbeads.
The law took effect in early July 2017 and was expected to be enforced on the state and local levels nationally. Manufacturers had to halt production of items made with microbeads immediately. Companies had exactly until 2018 to stop allowing such products from entering the market or being delivered nationwide.
For toothpastes, companies and factories had until 2018 to quit production and to 2019 to end market and delivery.
These timelines were meant to give organizations time to test their new products for safety and effectiveness and introduce their alternatives. The industry has sought and found alternative sin bamboo powder, bio-glitters, jojoba beads, rice bran and other such plant-and-oil-based materials.
In those years, other countries followed suit. Canada, the UK, France, Sweden, the EU Commission, China, Japan and Korea were among the first to do so, imposing permanent bans on products with microbeads and having industry offer alternatives.
By 2020, the industry was facing thousands of lawsuits and settling many of them in 2024.
It worked extensively with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or FDA, the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, the United Nations, industry trade associations and environmental awareness groups to back laws and government rules to purge the market of harmful substances.
