I try to do my part in reducing harmful junk I let go into the environment, but I haven’t been able to decide what to do with an exfoliating hand soap I received as a gift. It has small little particles (like the teeny blue plastic bits in some toothpaste). I read somewhere about plastic sludges in the Pacific/Atlantic oceans which is not a good thing.
Ok, so how do I get rid of this liquid hand soap? Can’t toss it down the sink because the less-than-a-hundred blue thingies in my bottle will eventually join the plastic oceanic sludge. I can’t give back because that’s rude. There is no way I can strain these nano particles. I toss out into the trash and it just sits there in the plastic bottle or ends up in recycle bin. What to do?
Sorry if this question has been asked before. I guess I am still in denial about the presidential election results.
You could have a small vault of solid gold (because it is chemically inert) custom built and put them in that, then drill a deep, deep pit in a geologically stable area, lower the vault down there, and back-fill it with concrete.
(Alternately, you could accept that these little particles that are too small to strain out aren’t going to cause any problems if they ever reach the ocean. Plastic debris cause problems because they can choke animals that might eat them. What you are describing is orders of magnitude too small to be a concern.)
BTW, are you sure that it is plastic and not something else? Because I see that plastic microbeads in soap have been banned in the US (assuming that you are in the US.)
(And aren’t nanoparticles, BTW–vastly too large for that.)
(BTW, I realize the google links contradict my original comment–the description of “nano” sized threw me, which would place them in the scale of not being a problem for anything larger than a euglena.)
Well, according to Wikipedia the large end for microbeads is 1mm, or 0.0005236 cubic centimeters. Also from the wiki, they tend to be made from polyethylene, which is almost 1 gram per cubic centimeter. If there are 100 microbeads in the container, that means around 0.005 cc or 0.005 grams of polyethylene. Just to be safe, assume that the estimate is off by an order of magnitude, so 1,000 microbeads and 0.05 cc or 0.05 grams of polyethylene. According to a table on this site, polyethylene has roughly the same energy content as fuel oil or gasoline, so (if I haven’t screwed up my my math) .05 grams of polyethylene would have around the same energy as 1/100,000th of a gallon of gas. So (to pick a fairly random value) say a car gets 30 miles per gallon. Burning the microbeads would be the equivalent of driving the car around 18 inches. Probably get a similar amount of energy from the match used to burn them. (That’s with the 10x overestimate of beads–with the original estimate of 100 beads, make it 1.8 inches.)
(Of course, this is assuming that the OP dissolves the soap in a container of water, decants as much water as possible, allow the remaining water to dry, and collects the beads, since the liquid soap itself won’t easily burn.)
Whew… I think I will bury the damn hand soap and walk those 18 inches. OTOH, thanks for thinking thru that calculations. this is one of the reasons why I love SD
Our sewers don’t drain into the ocean. I think the particles will get filtered out at the sewage treatment plant and get buried in a landfill. Though it’s probably more energy-efficient to send it straight to the landfill without going through the sewers first.
The majority of our sewers do indeed drain into the ocean (assuming you live somewhere near the ocean). A typical waste water treatment plant does provide some physical filtration, but its typically relatively coarse. Above the size of the items described above anyway.
The majority of the treatment is to reduce, remove or render inert the biological component of the waste and any (some) potentially harmful chemicals.
If you dump down the sink, I’d guess the particles will land in the sea. But I also don’t think that matters overmuch, in the grand scheme of things. Worry about some other low hanging fruit first.