Ocean Pollution: 8 Trillion Microbeads a Day from US

The good news is that anti-microbead rhetoric has already been on the lips of environment protection advocates for a long time, and some law-makers are listening. Last year, for instance, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman released a new report detailing the damages that microbeads cause to local ecosystems. The report was part of a bid to have the "Microbead-Free Waters Act" enacted. The bill would make New York State one of the first in the nation to ban the sale of any-and-all products containing microbeads.

Green's team points out, however, that previously successful bans wound up being rife with loopholes.

"New wording should ensure that a material that is persistent, bioaccumulative, or toxic is not added to products designed to go down the drain," the researchers wrote in their report, which can be found in the latest issue of Environmental Science and Technology."

"The probability of risk from microbead pollution is high," they wrote, "while the solution to this problem is simple."

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