Johnson & Johnson to Stop Selling Plastic Cotton Swabs for the Best Reason Ever

The multinational corporation, Johnson & Johnson, announced that it will discontinue its plastic stemmed cotton swabs due to the dangerous effects they have on marine life. Niamh Finan, a marketing manager with Johnson & Johnson, told the Independent, “We recognize that our products have an environmental footprint, and that’s why we have actively switched our cotton buds range from plastic to a paper stick.” But the company did not come to this conclusion on their own.

Several environmental organization in the U.K. have been campaigning hard aginst these unnecessary sticks of plastic. Dr. Clavers, a research officer with the environmental group Fidra, spoke out against plastic cotton swabs for some time. The fact is, there is no proper method of disposal for cotton swabs – you can’t recycle them – so they end up in landfills and eventually make their way onto beaches and into marine ecosystems. The Marine Conservation Society also added their voices to the activists over at Fidra and added that their research showed that plastic cotton swabs were the sixth most common type of trash found on beaches in the U.K.

And this plastic debris isn’t just spoiling the scenery around the world beaches, it’s killing marine life.  Every year we put 8.8 million tons of plastic into our planet’s oceans. These waste does not go away, they stay in the water for hundreds of years, cutting, entangling, and strangling marine life before they break down into microplastics that infiltrate ever facet of marine ecosystems and a recent study from the University of Ghent estimates that five trillion microplastics enter our oceans every year and by 2050, there will be more plastic in our oceans than fish.

These plastics currently threatened over 800 marine species, but unless we change the way we deal with plastics, this number will only get bigger. Which is why Johnson & Johnson’s most recent move to reduce their plastic waste is so exciting. And while this corporation is doing its part to clean up our oceans, you can help too by reducing the disposable plastic you use in your daily life.

This is easy to do, you just have to do a little extra planning before you leave the house. Bring a reusable water bottle with you when you leave the house and a reusable tote bag with you when you go to the grocery store. And of course, if you are going to use a cotton swab (not sure why we need these things in the first place) – be sure it has a paper stem.

For more tips on how to keep our oceans clean, join One Green Planet’s #CrushPlastic campaign!

Image source: HG Photography/Shutterstock