Tesco to remove microbeads within a month
Tesco has pledged to phase out the use of microbeads in its own brand toiletries and cleaning products within a month. Earlier this year, the UK government committed to banning the sale of personal care products containing microbeads from the end of 2017. Tesco has asked suppliers to remove the microbeads, pieces of plastic measuring under 0.5mm in diameter, or replace them with natural alternatives such as coconut shell. Tesco will also place larger “do not flush” labels on its own brand of wet wipes – products blamed for blocking sewers and causing pollution – whilst making its “flushable” wipes more degradable.
Tesco will have phased out microbeads from all its own brand cosmetics and household cleaning products within a month, it was announced on Thursday.

While UK ministers recently said personal care products containing these tiny pieces of plastic will be banned from sale by the end of 2017, it is not clear yet whether the ban will extend to other types of products that rely on their abrasive properties.

But Tesco said that it was listening to customers’ concerns and in the spring it had instructed suppliers to either cut microbeads from products such as toothpaste entirely, or to use natural alternatives such as ground coconut shell in face scrubs.

The supermarket will also make “do not flush” labels much bigger on the front of its own brand wet wipes, which campaigners and water companies say are clogging up sewers and causing pollution. And the company’s own brand “flushable” wipes will soon be manufactured to break down more easily.

Tesco admitted it had been “behind the game” on issues affecting the oceans and marine life before.

Microbeads are pieces of plastic less than 0.5mm in diameter and have been commonly used in health and beauty products to provide an exfoliating effect. But they have been blamed for harming marine life’s ability to reproduce, and experts say more research is needed on their potential human health impacts.

“What we’re effectively doing by and large is turning the clock back,” said Tim Smith, group quality director at Tesco, adding there was no reason industry and consumers could not go back to a decade ago when microbeads were not so widely used in products.

Greenpeace’s David Santillo on microbeads.

The company’s action will affect 10 personal care and 10 household products, with the microbeads simply dropped completely in most cases and in others replaced by natural alternatives such as calcium salts. Smith said there would be no difference to shoppers in price or performance.

“We’ve had to do quite a lot in a short time because Tesco has been slightly behind the game,” he said of the supermarket’s approach to the health of the oceans, including stocking of sustainable fish.

The company has also asked other brands to disclose what is in their products and what their intent is regarding microbeads, but Smith would not promise to stop selling such products if the brands were not taking action.

Kerry McCarthy, Labour MP and a member of the environment audit committee, said: “We’ve won the argument for a ban on microbeads in cosmetics and personal products. We need to take it a step further and see if companies can disclose what is in their products rather than relying on the likes of Greenpeace to do that analysis.”

Microbeads for examination onboard the Greenpeace vessel, Esperenza, while docked in London. Photograph: Adam Vaughan/The Guardian

Greenpeace, whose Esperanza ship is docked in London for the start of a major oceans campaign by the group, said that microbeads needed to be stopped at source because cleaning it up in the oceans was almost impossible.

“You can’t clean this stuff up effectively, partly because it’s too big a problem and partly because so little ends up at the surface,” said David Santillo, a scientist at Greenpeace and the University of Exeter, as he held up a Petri dish of the beads.

That dish, he said, contained hundreds of thousands of the blue and white beads, some measuring as little as 0.1mm across, that he had extracted from a single tube of Clearasil face scrub. But he added that with products beyond cosmetics, it was often hard to discern microbeads using infrared analysis and other techniques because their make-up was so much more complex.