Fish are eating plastic microbeads, which are capable of attracting and releasing toxic chemicals, scientists say.
The plastics in our seafood
On a beach in Sydney's Botany Bay, Dave West from the Boomerang Alliance shows the small bits of plastic that get into our food chain.
Australian and Chinese researchers have shown for the first time that chemical pollutants accumulated on the surface of microbeads can pass into the fish that eat them.
With fish being a staple meat in the Australian diet, the researchers say products with the tiny plastics should be immediately removed from sale.
RMIT researchers have shown microbeads can and do contaminate fish with toxic chemical pollutants. Photo: William Meppem "We know generally that if someone eats a fish, they risk eating any pollution that may be in the fish," said Bradley Clarke, lead investigator and environmental scientist at RMIT University.
"Our next step is to determine the implications of our findings on microbeads for public health, working out the significance of this exposure pathway and precisely measuring how much pollution could be entering this human food chain."
Advertisement
Microbeads are found in an array of skin and personal care products. Once used, billions of the plastic particles are washed into waterways, harming the environment and wildlife.
At least 11 major companies, including supermarket giants Woolworths and Coles, and personal care heavyweights Unilever and L'Oreal, have pledged to phase out microbeads in their products.
Plastic microbeads isolated from face and body scrubs. Photo: RMIT University The federal government has reached an agreement with all states to phase out microbeads by no later than July 2018.
In the controlled laboratory study, the researchers spiked microbeads they had isolated from popular face cleansers with "environmentally relevant" concentrations of the pollutant polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) and fed them to Murray River rainbow fish. Dr Bradley Clarke from RMIT University says that "if someone eats a fish, they risk eating any pollution that may be in the fish". Photo: RMIT University
The study, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, revealed that up to 12.5 per cent of PBDEs on the microbeads leached into the tissue of the fish.
PBDEs are known to biomagnify up the food chain in marine animals. Eating fish and shellfish is linked to elevated levels of PBDEs in humans.
Such pollutants have been linked to neurological health problems, impaired immune function and fertility problems.
"We shouldn't have to wait one or two years for these products to be banned, because in that time, billions more microbeads will be released into the environment," said Dr Clarke.
"It would be nice to see an immediate ban, and the companies investing money into remediation costs. Microbeads should never have been in products in the first place."
In November 2014, Fairfax Media reported how the tiny plastic beads used in scrubs and exfoliants were accumulating in fish in Sydney Harbour.
At Middle Harbour, scientists found 60-100 particles of plastic micro debris in 100 millilitres of sediment – among the highest levels in the world.
A Do Something campaign led to companies promising to phase out the microbeads.
In 2015, the United States' Senate passed legislation to phase out the use of microbeads in cosmetics after finding they were detrimental to fish and other aquatic wildlife.
The Senate decision was part of changes to wider chemical safety laws that seek to protect consumers from an array of dangerous chemicals in everyday products.
===================
The U.S. Just Banned Microbeads, Those Tiny Plastic Environmental Disasters in Your Face Wash
By Zoë Schlanger On 12/31/15 at 3:09 PM
Every day, 8 trillion microbeads are being emitted into aquatic habitats in the U.S. And that's only 1 percent of the total. 5Gyres, courtesy of Oregon State University After plenty of damning scientific research and years of reminders from environmentalists that microbeads are a terrible, no-good, disastrous idea, President Barack Obama signed a bill into law this week banning them for good.
Microbeads are the tiny plastic spheres used as exfoliants in face wash, toothpaste, deodorant and just about any other beauty products on the shelves. For a while in the early aughts, you could be forgiven for thinking that the presence of “exfoliating beads” in your face wash made it a better product. Everyone likes to exfoliate. But manufacturing plastic at such a tiny scale and then disseminating them by the tens of thousands into nearly every American home turned out to be a really, really bad idea. Our wastewater treatment plants are not designed to handle the microbeads, which means they mostly wind up back in the environment. They also don’t biodegrade, so they stay in the ground and waterways virtually forever. A large volume of microbeads are winding up in all the wrong places.
In a paper published earlier this year, researchers at the University of California Davis and Oregon State University found that roughly 8 trillion microbeads are currently finding their way into streams and oceans in the U.S. every single day. That’s enough tiny plastic balls to cover more than 300 tennis courts. And that’s only 1 percent of the total microbeads discharged each day.
The other 99 percent wind up in sludge from sewage plants, because the designers of sewage plants did not anticipate the need to sift out minuscule bits of plastic from the rest of the waste the plants handle. It gets worse: Sewage sludge is often used as fertilizer on farms. That means plastic microbeads are being sprayed all over rows of crops, where, again, they do not biodegrade. The microbeads then run off the land with rainwater, winding up in—you guessed it—streams and oceans. Then they end up in aquatic animals’ stomachs, where they may be toxic.
“We've demonstrated in previous studies that microplastic of the same type, size and shape as many microbeads can transfer contaminants to animals and cause toxic effects,” Chelsea Rochman, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Davis and the lead author on the analysis, said in a statement.
The new bill, called the Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015, requires manufacturers to eliminate microbeads from their products by 2017.