Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015 is a United States law that prohibits the addition of plastic microbeads in the manufacturing of certain personal care products, such as toothpaste. The purpose of the law is to reduce water pollution caused by these products. Manufacture of the microbead-containing products was prohibited in July 2017, and retail sales are prohibited as of July 2018.
Background
Over the course of the past 50 years, plastics have increasingly become a large part of people's lives all around the world. Due to the durability, versatility, and low cost of plastics, consumers and industries utilize plastics for a variety of products. However, with increased production and consumption of plastics comes an increase in plastic waste that inevitably makes its way into the ocean. Scientists estimate that there is over 150 million tons of plastic residing in the World's oceans today.
Plastics are made from petroleum and resist biodegradation; they absorb persistent organic pollutants, leach chemicals that are toxic to humans and other organisms, degrade ocean and terrestrial ecosystems, and may impact migratory patterns, trophic structures (food chains), and habitats around the world. Plastics are a direct threat to the well-being of marine life as they can lead to entanglement causing animals to drown, it can impair their ability to catch food, and ingested plastics can block digestive tracts and cause starvation and even death. The detrimental impacts that plastics have on individual animals affects not only their livelihood, but may also affect the balance of ocean ecosystem and the ecological services they provide for human benefit.
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This entry incorporates text from “Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.