Wow, how kind of them. How about we stop politely asking our Manufacturer Overlords to stop their destructive activity in 4 years and instead get legislators do their job and ban their use immediately?

A local or state politician in the Great Lakes area should have no interest in protecting a manufacturer of these products who is likely in another state or country. Their interest is entirely in favor of protecting the Lakes.

And who are these people scrubbing their faces with microscopic plastic beads? What's wrong with good old fashioned coarse salt or sugar? Why do we need more plastic? Can this plastic be inhaled accidentally? Can it leach into the raw scrubbed skin? Who asks these questions?

Note the following from the article:

  we took science ... to the companies and, without 
  having to spend time and money involved in a policy 
  solution, the companies themselves chose to solve it on 
  their own.

Which points to another possibility: They know how long it would actually take to get those kinds of laws enacted and enforced, and they'll only go as fast as that.

And don't forget, two years is enough time to forget about this. So in two years, maybe they'll simply do nothing at all.

Unless they're adding something to the plastic, or coating it in something, they could absolutely just ship it back as smaller than usual nurdles, or make use of it for something else in their manufacturing process, like making bottles or caps.

In any case, do you really think they have a two year supply of this stuff? That'd be crazy.

Toothpaste and facewash?

I find it very plausible that they have a two-year supply of particular products, that can easily happen if demand does not meet expectations, or if they planned limited campaigns of particular products.

This isn't the 1920s. Most major companies run on much leaner inventory, and it's not uncommon to turn over your entire warehouse several times a month.

Building a body of research evidence, drafting legislation, putting it out for review, getting it passed into law, etc. all these things take time. It could then get challenged legally which would obviously take more time. Plus you then have to give companies time to figure out what's in their pipeline and remove it.

The legislative route could easily take years longer than companies willingly switching away based upon preliminary evidence. It took a decade for DDT to be banned and that was with a lot more evidence against it.

Sadly, this solution is probably far quicker than an adversarial legislative one. It would be very difficult to get that legislation passed without overwhelming evidence of harm to combat the organization's lobbying dollars.

>A local or state politician in the Great Lakes area should have no interest in protecting a manufacturer of these products who is likely in another state or country.

Can they mail a check? If so, he/she has plenty of interest in protecting the manufacturer. The way it works every day, sadly.

We are now born into a transgenerational consumer culture. Most of us never have an independent thought. QED.

You can put a trademark on anything you want, it's not a patent on the substance. Evian is trademark on water, for example.

It's time to make the sugar barons eat dirt (but free of tiny plastic beads — that would be cruel and unusual).

> Cost is not a significant factor.

Yes, for multi-nationals, it is. Increase that 5c for plastic to 6c for sugar, and that’s potentially a million or two off the bottom line for the company. That's how large companies work.

Also, if it's more expensive to use plastics for these products, why do you suppose they didn't use "NaturalSucroseSuperBeads TM" from the start? Perhaps they didn't think of it? Unlikely. If it really wasn't for cost reasons, then its likely for ease of production, product stability, or other such reasons.

> This is a wider beauty industry issue and we, like many other global beauty brands, have been forced to use synthetic scrub particles for face products in the last few years as safety restrictions in some markets around the world have become more stringent. These safety restrictions require us to ensure that all scrub particles used on the face are consistently rounded in shape, which is difficult to achieve with natural particles. In order to provide a global product formulation that is stable and safe for use we have, unfortunately, had to resort to synthetic materials such as polyethylene.

http://5gyres.org/posts/2013/04/26/get_plastic_off_my_face_a...

I agree that there may be other reasons to choose plastic over sugar - companies don't generally do things that are bad for them - I was only disputing the disparity in the raw cost of the ingredients. Personally I've noticed that sugar based scrubs don't hold up as well, they tend to either dry out in the jar or get too wet. Fussy consumers who want life to look like a TV commercial are part of the problem here.

Here's an example product:

http://www.origins.com/product/3829/10219/Bath-Body/Star-Col...

Couple that with the added benefit of being water soluble, cleanup after using the product is especially easy. Scrub and rinse (and gently scrub) until you can't feel the product. It's self-documenting. :-)

http://www.treehugger.com/organic-beauty/8-homemade-salt-and...

The entire idea of making a product composed partly of plastic that's thrown into the sewer system is patently insane.