Sir: I think we should all be grateful to The Chatham Voice for its recent interview with John Lawrence who revealed some startling facts about our “pure” lake water.
Like most households, all our surplus pharmaceuticals are given to a local pharmacist who disposes of them. Personally, I had no knowledge of microbeads, those tiny plastic particles in many everyday care products such as facial cleansers, body wash, shaving cream and, yes, toothpaste. And if I had known about them, I would have assumed they are dealt with by the sewage treatment plant.
These minuscule plastic spheres range in size from 0.0004 mm to 1.24 mm in diameter. When you flush those micro-scrubbers down the drain, they flow to the sewage treatment plant. Because they are so small, the filters at the plant cannot treat them, and those microbeads end up in in the Great Lakes system.
My research tells me there’s an average of 300,000 microbeads found in one common personal care product alone. And sewage treatment plants are allowing millions of the plastic particles to freely flow into our lakes every day.
And what about plastic water bottles? I have discovered that in the U.S. alone it has been figured that at least 50 million plastic bottles are thrown away (not recycled) every day. Laid end to end, these bottles would stretch from San Francisco to New York City and back again.
Thanks to Bruce Corcoran for this story!
Stephen Beecroft
Chatham
