Scrub it out! anti microplastics campaign extends to luxury brands

With many personal care brands ditching the use of microplastics in their formulations, the Scrub it out! campaign is now turning its attention to the luxury beauty sector.

The campaign, a joint initiative between the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) and Fauna & Flora International (FFI), has seen major high street retailers including Waitrose, Boots, Asda, Marks & Spencer, Superdrug, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Cooperative, Lush, Morrisons, and L’Occitane all pledge to get rid of plastics from their own brand personal care products. Discussions are still underway with Aldi and Lidl but MCS hopes they too will set a date for plastic free own-brand products.

Tanya Cox, projects manager for Marine Plastics at FFI says they’ve been working with cosmetics manufacturers on microplastic pollution for several years and launched the Good Scrub Guide to harness consumer power and dissuade companies from using these ingredients. “Through this, we and our partners, including MCS, have been able to secure a number of high-profile commitments from multi-national corporations to phase out plastic microbeads.”

MCS says the Scrub it Out! Campaign will now move on to luxury personal care products. Dr Laura Foster, pollution programme manager at MCS commented: “It’s possible that consumers assume the more expensive the product the better is for you, and the more natural the ingredients it contains. But we don’t believe this is always the case."

MCS and Fauna & Flora International are also asking the public to look for certain plastic ingredients - such as Polyethylene, Polypropylene and Nylon - in high end products and upload mobile phone images of labels to its website so it can highlight the issue with companies.

Picture credit: © Yekophotostudio | Dreamstime.com - Scrub Squeezed Out From Tube Photo