P&G dropping microbeads ahead of lawmaker action

Microbeads, the tiny plastic balls added to body scrubs and toothpastes by such manufacturers as Procter & Gamble Co. and L’Oreal SA, were marketed as the greatest beauty aid since cold cream. Now fish have a gut full, and some U.S. and state lawmakers want the ingredient banned.

Washed down bathroom drains, the abrasives evade treatment- plant filters and accumulate in waterways. Researchers who found microbeads of 1 millimeter – the width of a pencil tip– and smaller in the Great Lakes, the largest surface freshwater system in the world, fear they may introduce toxic chemicals to the food chain.

“The products look really attractive sitting on the store shelves,” said Sherri Mason, a chemistry professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia, who led the Great Lakes study. “Like many people, I assumed it was something that was biodegradable, something that would break apart.”

The New Jersey Assembly’s consumer affairs panel unanimously approved a bill Thursday to make the most densely populated state the second in the U.S., after Illinois, to ban products containing the beads. Lawmakers in California, New York and Michigan have proposed similar measures, and U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat, is sponsoring legislation in Congress to end the sale or distribution of bead-containing products by 2018.

“I’m of the generation where our beaches were polluted,” said New Jersey Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan Jr. “To a large extent they were polluted because of what we dumped” into the Atlantic Ocean.

Typically made of polypropylene or polyethylene — used in most plastic shopping bags — the beads were patented in 1972 and their use in consumer products exploded in the 1990s, according to a report by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

With potentially 19 tons of particles discharged into New York’s wastewater annually, traces are winding up in the digestive and circulatory systems of animals, including perch, and researchers around the world have detected them in marine mussels and shore crabs. Their synthetic molecules bind to chemicals to become “a pathway for pollutants to enter the food chain and contaminate the fish and wildlife we eat,” according to the report.

Product marketing, though, cast the additives as a beauty-regimen revolution.

Procter & Gamble’s Olay website advertises the Total Effects line “for skin that looks visibly younger and clearer.”

On the website for Cincinnati-based P&G’s Crest toothpaste, a bubblegum-flavored formula carries this pitch: “Give your kids the cavity protection they need — and the sparkles and flavors they want.” The American Dental Association, which gave its seal of acceptance to the product, said Crest’s “colored polyethylene specks” are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, according to a statement posted Tuesday.

“While the ingredient in question is completely safe, we understand there is a growing preference for P&G to remove this ingredient, so P&G will,” Jessica Spano, a spokeswoman in New York for MSLGroup, a unit of Publicis Groupe SA, said on behalf of the manufacturer by e-mail Tuesday. It will discontinue use of microbeads by March 2016, with the majority of its products becoming microbead-free within six months.

“Don’t just clean – deep clean and invigorate your skin,” actress Hayden Panettiere says in a commercial on Google Inc.’s YouTube for Johnson & Johnson’s Neutrogena face scrub whose “icy-blue microbeads” provide a “cool rush.”

J&J, based in New Brunswick, New Jersey, is introducing reformulated products in 2015 and will discontinue use of microbeads in all its personal-care products by 2017, according to its website.

Unilever, the London- and Rotterdam-based maker of Dove soap, whose U.S. headquarters are in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, said in a statement that it expects to phase out the particles from products in January.

L’Oreal, the world’s largest cosmetics maker, which has factories in New Jersey, said on its website in February that its Biotherm brand will be microbead-free this year and its Body Shop products next year, with discontinuation among all products in 2017. The Paris-based company is looking for alternatives that can do the same thing, such as mineral particles and fruit seeds, it said.

“The industry gets it,” said Diegnan, whose bill would ban manufacturing of microbead-containing products in New Jersey in January and end sales by 2018. “Hopefully this bill will give them a gentle tug to expedite the process.”