TERM 1
Introduction
DEFINITION 1
My name is Teresa Davies, and I'll be presenting on...Attending
college at Loyola University, we get t o enjoy the beautiful Lake
Michigan right at our doorstep. Whet her were swimming in the
summer, out on a boat, or drinking fro m a water fountain, this
water is an important part of all of our lives. As humans, we
depend on bodies of water such as La ke Michigan, other
freshwater sources, and our oceans as crucial resources for
countless uses including for drinking w ater and for food.
TERM 2
Slide 2
DEFINITION 2
Unfortunately, one of the worst polluters of these beautiful
and useful bodies of water are microbeads. Microbeads are
those tiny, plastic shells that are found in some personal care
products such as soaps, moisturizers, toothpastes, and face
washes intending to be exfoliating. <Reference photos on
slide>
TERM 3
Slide 3 Part 1
DEFINITION 3
When theyre washed down the drai n, theyre so small that they
pass through most water treatment systems, and, as a result,
make it into bodies of water including oceans and lakes. This is
problematic firstly because they con tribute to the accumulating
plastic pollution in the water. Accordin g to Nature World News, 8
trillion plastic bits are dumped into oce ans and lakes every day,
and according to a study done by She rri Mason as cited by the
National Public Radio, 17,000 bits of tin y
TERM 4
Slide 3 Part 2
DEFINITION 4
plastic items are found per square km in Lake Michigan alone. In
addition to the currently unfixable po llution that they cause, these
microbeads look like food to marine c reatures, and can harm or kill
them once consumed due to the to xins the beads absorb. Now
this is a problem not only for the aqua tic creatures that consume
them, but for us, too, because if thes e toxins from trillions of
microbeads are passed on to, say, fish , they can be potentially
passed on to humans who eat the fis h, posing a serious health
risk.
TERM 5
Slide 4
DEFINITION 5
Luckily, this issue has been acknowle dged by many scientists and
a few state governments, including Il linois, and movements to
make microbeads illegal are in the w orks for upcoming years.
Unfortunately, this is not enough to r emedy the unimaginable
damage to our water sources that w ill occur between that time
and now. While businesses are exper imenting with more
environmentally-friendly replacemen ts for microbeads, such as
naturally dissolvable PHA plastic as obs erved by an article in
