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What To Do With Those Old Microbeads

found plastic water bottle

The Soap Dispensary & Kitchen Staples is not just your regular store – it’s the first store in the city to specialize in household cleaners, household soaps, green ingredients, personal care products and other lifestyle goods that share one thing in common. The Soap Dispensary is Vancouver’s first zero waste grocery store.

That’s right. These cool people are all about refills. Bring your own reusable container (or buy one of theirs) and buy products - not packaging. What a great idea, huh? Using refillable containers helps keep single-use plastics out of landfills, watersheds, and energy-intensive recycling systems.

The reason we’re bringing up The Soap Dispensary is because they are helping to collect products with microbeads for a local researcher by the name of Rhiannon Moore, an ocean advocate who is researching the effects of microplastics in Arctic food webs.

Products with microbeads have been banned in Canada as of July 1st, 2018 because they are terrible for the environment. Everything we use on our face and body is washed down the drain.

“It doesn’t end up in some magical sorting area where drainage elves sort the bad from the good. Microbeads are difficult to remove from wastewater and are able to enter lakes, rivers and oceans. In our waterways, pollutants cling to them. Marine animals eat these toxic pills and then, in turn, they end up in the human food chain.”

If you have any old products with microbeads kicking around, The Soap Dispensary will take them until the end of July. This includes old foot scrubs, exfoliating body and face washes, toothpaste, etc. If you’re not sure, look at the ingredient list for words such as polyethylene.

Thanks to the Soap Dispensary for being such great friends of our oceans!