8 trillion microbeads wash into our waterways every day - with devastating consequences

Exfoliating body washes and lotions can make your skin feel smooth and supple. But when these products rinse off your body and wash down the drain, some of them turn into an environmental nightmare.

These and hundreds of other products - exfoliating facial scrubs, toothpastes, moisturizers, cosmetics, and cleaning supplies - can contain tiny pieces of plastic called microbeads.

These beads can evade standard water treatment processes and eventually end up in our oceans, rivers, and streams in staggering amounts.

In fact, a study that came out in September 2015 estimates that a whopping 8 trillion microbeads are washing into global waterways every single day. The researchers report that microbeads have contaminated each of the three major open oceans - the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Indian.

As a result, the US is on the brink of completely banning them. The Senate just passed a bill called The Microbead Free Waters Act on Dec. 18, which would prohibit the sale of cosmetic products containing microbeads across the country - a mandate that came just 10 days after the House of Representatives approved the same bill on Dec. 8.

Now, the bill is in President Obama's hands - waiting to be signed into law or vetoed.

This new law is bad news for those who have come to love products containing microbeads, but astronomically good news for the environment.

While it's hard to say exactly how much microbead pollution contributes to the overall accumulation of plastics littering our waterways, scientists can muster a guess by calculating how many beads pass through waste water treatment plants.

After waste water leaves your home, it undergoes several stages of cleaning at a treatment plant before it returns back into the environment. The process separates the solids - or sludge - from the liquids, and then sends the cleaned liquid effluent back into the water cycle, often into aquatic habitats. During this process, some beads get shaken out of the solids into the liquid, never to be retrieved again.

Studies have found that each liter of collected effluent can contain between zero to seven microbeads. This may not seem like a lot, but US waste treatment plants are capable of treating more than 160 trillion liters of water per day. Even if all plants operated at half capacity, the researchers report, that still means that they dump about 8 trillion microbeads into US aquatic habitats every day.

When these beads run into our lakes, rivers, streams, and seas, they can cause incredible damage. The synthetic polymers that the beads are made of aren't easily broken down and can survive in these environments for years. Toxic chemicals such as PCBs, pesticides, and motor oil also tend to adhere to the tiny plastic balls, making them dangerous.

The beads also tend to float rather than sink to the bottom. They then become easy snacks for sea creatures, which can mistake them for tasty fish eggs. But food they are not.

Thousands of aquatic creatures - from large fish to tiny plankton - eat these harmful beads potentially covered in toxins. The toxins can accumulate in their bodies, which eventually may end up on our dinner table.

"The effect is similar to grinding up plastic water bottles, other products of concern to environmentalists, and pumping them into oceans and lakes," Rachel Abrams wrote in a story on microbeads for The New York Times.

If the new bill becomes law, the US will begin halting production of hundreds of products containing the pinhead-sized beads on January 1, 2017.

The legislation would also ban the use of these tiny plastic beads in all cosmetics made in the US starting in 2018, and in all over-the-counter pharmaceuticals beginning in 2019.

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