Canada and the UK are the latest countries to enact bans on microbeads - small exfoliating beads found in personal care products. But what little scientific basis there was for doing so has just been exposed as a fraud, resulting in the retraction of the only paper that claims microbeads are a significant threat to marine life.
When baseless fears are whipped up by environmentalists, politicians are quick to capitalise by introducing new laws and regulations to pacify the fearful public. This plays into the myth that politicians and the regulatory state are the only things standing between corporate greed and environmental catastrophe.
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