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Petition to curb plastic microbeads in Canada met with overwhelming response

Petition to curb plastic microbeads in Canada met with overwhelming response

Tyler Doose had modest ambitions for his petition for Environment Canada to ban plastic microbeads – those tiny plastic globules most commonly made of polyethylene that appear in shower gels and toothpastes for their exfoliating factor.

The 23-year-old environmental studies and earth sciences student at Carleton University had just spent a year studying the water quality in the Ottawa River and stumbled on microbeads, which due to their small size – under five millimetres – have a tendency to slip through sewage systems and directly into the lakes and rivers. So he tossed up a petition on www.change.org in March, not expecting much to happen.

“Within the first couple of days it had maybe 120 signatures and I was like – wow, this is crazy, this little school thing turned into 120 people signing it,” he says. “Then I woke up one night and saw it was 15,000.”

As of this week, that petition has reached over 46,000 signatures, putting Doose at the forefront of the fight against microbeads. Since launching the petition, Doose has appeared as a witness at a public hearing surrounding the tiny plastic balls, spoken at an environmental summit in Vancouver and given a speech to parliament about banning the substance.

“Councillor Paul Ainslie presented the petition to Toronto city council with a motion that they support the ban federally, provincially, and locally,” says Doose. “That passed unanimously without debate, instantly as soon as they saw the petition they agreed and it went through.”

But Doose isn’t the only one pressing the authorities to curb the use of microbeads.

On June 1, the Ontario government’s Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs met to consider Bill 75 – an act met to monitor and eliminate the use of microbeads and Megan Leslie, a Halifax NDP MP, recently presented a motion in the House of Commons to have the government immediately list the beads as a toxin under the Environmental Protection Act. She received unanimous support.

Mark Mattson, president of Lake Ontario Waterkeeper – a Toronto-based environmental justice advocacy group – says the widespread backing for banning microbeads is unprecedented.

“Unilever, L'Oreal, and The Body Shop are supposed to be microbead-free this year and Johnson & Johnson is in the process of phasing it out and so is Procter & Gamble,” says Mattson. “It’s the first time in my career in the last 20 years where I’ve really seen industry, government, and the environment movement move so quickly on something to have the products phased out.”

Procter and Gamble declined a request for comment on the status of the removal, directing anyone with questions towards their FAQ where it says the plan is to remove microbeads from all its products by next March.

Last year, Procter and Gamble made a commitment to phase out microbeads from its products after some negative publicity around its Crest toothpaste brand. In addition to the environmental impact, there were reports that dentists were finding the microbeads stuck under their patients’ gum lines.

The challenge environmental groups are finding, says Mattson, is that cutting out microbeads is voluntary.

“Companies can say they are going to phase out microbeads then forget about it when the heat dies down,” he says. “Also the playing field isn’t even, companies doing the right thing are hurt when their competitors don’t have to innovate – the impact is enormous and urgent.”

Especially given that a study by U.S.-based non-profit 5Gyres found some products contain as many as 300,000 of the little plastic exfoliates per tube.

“And they last forever,” adds Mattson.

The end game for both Mattson and Doose is to get the government to place microbeads on the Priority Substances List, which would allow them to regulate and ban the substance. But unlike Doose’s signatures, it won’t happen overnight.

“It’s probably one of the most obvious and straightforward environmental crises we’ve come to in the past decade,” says Doose. “Even the manufactures don’t argue that there’s a problem with them – that’s why it’s so weird that the legislature is so slow.”