Workshop hand cleaners with microbeads - beware!

I keep politics away from this blog. RDM is about old bikes, enthusiasm for the same and celebrating this that unites us. There's some folks consider sensitivity to the environment as politics, it's not, it's just plain common sense. Of course our lives are a compromise and we can barely claim our hobby to be green but there are always steps you can take to avoid wanton pollution and waste.

The other day I ran out of workshop hand cleaner and nipped down to the local car spares shop to stock up on some new. I've always bought Manista Natural as it smells nice and citrusy and, well, 'natural' sounds good doesn't it. Something led me to read the ingredients and it seems the grainy-ness of the cleaner that I had always assumed was sand or something natural is in fact from polychips.

So, the bottom line is, if you are washing your hands with Manista or other brands of cleaner containing polychips / microbeads you are washing tiny grains of unfilterable plastic down the sink. Small grains of plastic that will find their way in to every waterway and ocean, into sea creatures and quite possibly on to your dinner plate if you eat seafood.

Of course Manista isn't the only handcleaner product out there with microbeads in it, there are several others. I guess they just incensed me by having the tenacity to call the product natural. Personally I took the tub of Manista back and swapped it for good old fashioned Swarfega without beads....

There's an article on the BBC website on microbeads. Hopefully they will be banned in the UK from 2017.