Microbeads will soon be a thing of the past after another leading UK supermarket promised to remove products with the tiny plastic beads by the end of the month.
Tesco’s own-brand beauty products containing the mini-exfoliators will be taken off its shelves by the end of 2017 - a year earlier than previously promised.
The supermarket has recently been under fire from consumers for failing to ban sales of these products fast enough, admitting it had previously been ‘behind the game’ on issues affecting oceans and marine life.
Tesco’s group quality director Tim Smith said during a Greenpeace event that he doesn’t see any reason why people can’t go back to buying cleansing products without microbeads, as they did 10 years ago. Microplastics in Tesco’s own-brand products will be removed completely, or replaced with eco-friendly alternatives such as calcium salts.
The tiny plastic beads can harm sea and marine life as they are too small to be trapped by wastewater treatment processes. One cleansing product can contain a whopping 360,000 microbeads, but there are natural alternatives available, including products that use anise seeds, sand, salt or coconut.
The UK government announced in September that all personal care products containing microbeads would be gone by the end of 2017. The US is slightly ahead, promising to ban them all by the middle of next year.
Retailers that have completely banned - or never used - microbead products in their range include Botanicals, Clarins, Lush, Dove and Simple. In supermarkets, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Asda - and soon Tesco - all stock own-brand products that get the green light.
The Beat the Bead campaign, which got the ball rolling to ban all microbead products across the globe by 2020, has a free app where you can scan a product’s barcode to see if it contains the beads.
But if you love the feeling of scrubbing your face with a certain level of abrasion, we’ve rounded up the natural products you can use to get the same exfoliating effect without harming sea life. Guilt-free shopping, kind of.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.