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Comment by joonix | Hacker News Reader

"remove by 2017."

Wow, how kind of them. How about we stop politely asking our Manufacturer Overlords to stop their destructive activity in 4 years and instead get legislators do their job and ban their use immediately?

A local or state politician in the Great Lakes area should have no interest in protecting a manufacturer of these products who is likely in another state or country. Their interest is entirely in favor of protecting the Lakes.

And who are these people scrubbing their faces with microscopic plastic beads? What's wrong with good old fashioned coarse salt or sugar? Why do we need more plastic? Can this plastic be inhaled accidentally? Can it leach into the raw scrubbed skin? Who asks these questions?

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They're probably sitting on a stockpile of material, and would have to write it off as a loss. Either that, or they're committed to contracts with suppliers.

Note the following from the article:

  we took science ... to the companies and, without 
  having to spend time and money involved in a policy 
  solution, the companies themselves chose to solve it on 
  their own.

This means that, since the behavior is voluntary, they get to do it on their own timeline. In order to force anything to go faster would require some cattle-prod of a law or regulation, with punitive measures that hurt the bottom line through fines and injunctions.

Which points to another possibility: They know how long it would actually take to get those kinds of laws enacted and enforced, and they'll only go as fast as that.

And don't forget, two years is enough time to forget about this. So in two years, maybe they'll simply do nothing at all.

It's just a particular kind of plastic that could be melted down and used for any purpose. There's no stockpile.

I can't imagine they are making their product on an order-by-order basis. Nor would they be buying supplies for their product that way, and selling back supplies is not a frictionless process. Of course there is a stockpile.

It's plastic. They sell it in the form of "hurdles" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_particle_water_pollutio...), small plastic particles, which are mostly standard sizes. These are then processed into their final form as required by simple machinery. Typically these are fed into an injection molding machine to make plastic parts, but could be used to produce plastic bags or sheet plastic for thermoforming.

Unless they're adding something to the plastic, or coating it in something, they could absolutely just ship it back as smaller than usual nurdles, or make use of it for something else in their manufacturing process, like making bottles or caps.

In any case, do you really think they have a two year supply of this stuff? That'd be crazy.

> or coating it in something

Toothpaste and facewash?

I find it very plausible that they have a two-year supply of particular products, that can easily happen if demand does not meet expectations, or if they planned limited campaigns of particular products.

These micro particles of plastic are used by the train load which is why it's horrifying they're still being used. Where would you keep a two year supply if you needed that much of this sort of material? A plant the size of Wyoming? Secondly, they do not have warehouses of toothpaste sitting around. It's perishable.

This isn't the 1920s. Most major companies run on much leaner inventory, and it's not uncommon to turn over your entire warehouse several times a month.

My uncle does supply chain for a major american cosmetics manufacturer, and it's pretty lean. There's few stockpiles, AFAIK.

Probably. But only a small stockpile. A large, multi-year stockpile would be financially suboptimal.

They need to test the new products which will replace these. You have to cook something up, make trial products, sell them in locations outside the US where there is even less consumer protection than exists here, collect feedback on potential side-effects, and quite possibly iterate.

Because the government can't turn around and unilaterally ban something instantly. This is a good thing.

Building a body of research evidence, drafting legislation, putting it out for review, getting it passed into law, etc. all these things take time. It could then get challenged legally which would obviously take more time. Plus you then have to give companies time to figure out what's in their pipeline and remove it.

The legislative route could easily take years longer than companies willingly switching away based upon preliminary evidence. It took a decade for DDT to be banned and that was with a lot more evidence against it.

And it's a relatively short runway. Mercury, cadmium, lead and friends have taken and are taking decades to phase out.

>Wow, how kind of them. How about we stop politely asking our Manufacturer Overlords to stop their destructive activity in 4 years and instead get legislators do their job and ban their use immediately?

Sadly, this solution is probably far quicker than an adversarial legislative one. It would be very difficult to get that legislation passed without overwhelming evidence of harm to combat the organization's lobbying dollars.

>A local or state politician in the Great Lakes area should have no interest in protecting a manufacturer of these products who is likely in another state or country.

Can they mail a check? If so, he/she has plenty of interest in protecting the manufacturer. The way it works every day, sadly.

Two years. Only P&G said they'd stop by 2017, the others said 2015.

My girlfriend makes natural scrubs. Struggles. Natural stuff is objectively better in blind trials, and cheaper, but people see natural products as "supplemental" to their "beauty regime" (fuck I hate that phrase), secondary to P&G/Unilever bullshit - which is a mindset I just can't comprehend.

We are now born into a transgenerational consumer culture. Most of us never have an independent thought. QED.

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