#2. No plastic exfoliants.

That last blog had a ranting quality that I kind of find distasteful. I think my frustration with the french scholastic system is affecting my general chill-ness. In an attempt to be more positive, here is my second New Years Eco Project resolution (I have to give Signe credit for this idea, it was her blog that made me want to do a New Years thing).

"Especially troubling was that Hardy's plankton recorder had trapped all this plastic 10 meters below the surface, suspended in the water. Since plastic mostly floats, that meant they were seeing just a fraction of what was actually there. Not only was the amount of plastic in the ocean increasing, but ever smaller bits of it were appearing - small enough to ride global sea currents. Thompson's team realized that slow mechanical action - waves and tides that grind against shorelines, turning rocks into beaches - were now doing the same to plastics... At the same time, there was no sign that any of the plastic was biodegrading, even when reduced to tiny fragments." (Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007. 144-145)
Weisman then goes on to talk about all the animals we hear about that die from plastic in the ocean, otters choking on the plastic six pack rings, birds strangled by nets, and other big sea animals found dead with chunks of plastic in their stomachs. He goes on to talk about the smaller animals in the ocean now ingesting these smaller particles, and how for many of them if the plastic bits are too big, it gets lodged in their intestines. Weisman refers to an experiment done by Richard Thompson on lugworms (some kind of bottom feeder), wherein on ingesting plastic, "... the particles lodged in their intestines, the resulting constipation was terminal." (Weisman, 145)

So here's where we get to exfoliants:
When we shower, and use our exfoliants, with their "micro-fine polyethylene granules," or "polyethylene micro-spheres," or "polyethylene beads," we're washing teensy little pieces of plastic right down the drain. Into the rivers and ocean, and into aqua-life bellies.

It's not hard to check the ingrediants list on the next bottle of exfoliant that you buy, and to get the bottle that's a buck fifty more expensive that uses natural exfoliants (which are apparently things like ground up seeds and crushed walnut shells).

So I vow never to use an exfoliant with plastic, not just for this year, but for the rest of my life.
Huzzah!