Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz will sign legislation Wednesday to ban personal care products containing microbeads, the tiny pieces of plastic which can pass through sewage treatment plants and into open water and potentially into fish.
On this issue, the notoriously-divided Erie County Legislature unanimously passed a ban to take effect in six-months and sent the local law to the county executive, who held a public hearing on the issue Wednesday.
The problem is not necessarily the microbeads themselves, but what chemicals they might carry into fish from open water.
The ban is opposed by the cosmetics industry which doesn't want piecemeal prohibitions by local governments and individual states. The industry would prefer any bans to start at the same time, even if years in the future.
Fredonia State Chemistry Professor Sherri Mason told the hearing she has done a lot of research on the microbeads in the Great Lakes.
"Not only on the Great Lakes and what's in the Great Lakes, we've done studies on wastewater treatment plant effluent, establishing the fact that these microbeads are making their way into and out of wastewater treatment plants," said Mason. "We've also done a food web assessment where we sampled 25 species of fish from Lake Erie and every single species that we've looked at has had microplastics within the gastro-intestinal tract."
A recent study for State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says 1,700 pounds of the microbeads go into local waterways each year and 50 tons in total across New York.
The ban isn't on the manufacture but on the sale in Erie County so it would be enforced against stores selling the products and not every label says it contains microbeads.
There are some concerns about staff to enforce the ban.
