Microbead
manufactured solid plastic particles smaller than one millimeter
Microbeads are manufactured solid plastic particles of less than one millimeter in their largest dimension. They are most frequently made of polyethylene but can be of other petrochemical plastics such as polypropylene and polystyrene.
They are used in exfoliating personal care products, toothpastes, and in biomedical and health-science research.
Microbeads can cause plastic particle water pollution and pose an environmental hazard for aquatic animals in freshwater and ocean water. In the United States, the Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015 phased out microbeads in rinse-off cosmetics by July 2017. Several other countries have also banned microbeads from rinse-off cosmetics, including Canada, France, New Zealand, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.
Types
Microbeads are manufactured solid plastic particles of less than one millimeter in their largest dimension when they are first created, and are typically created using material such as polyethylene (PE), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), nylon (PA), polypropylene (PP), and polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA). The most frequently used materials are polyethylene or other petrochemical plastics such as polypropylene and polystyrene. Microbeads are commercially available in particle sizes from 10 micrometres (0.00039 in) to 1 millimetre (0.039 in). Low melting temperature and fast phase transitions make them especially suitable for creating porous structures in ceramics and other materials.
“Microbead” enters the record as manufactured solid plastic particles smaller than one millimeter. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Microbead, manufactured and solid can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Microbead” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Microbead, manufactured and solid provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6839236. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2015 and 2017.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Microbead” 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.