I need your help! PLEASE.
Do you remember me going on about microplastics and how it would be great to have some way of knowing if you are buying a good or bad product? Well, now you get to help me make that happen for South Africa... yip... all of you (my millions of blog readers... hmmm). There is an app available in other parts of the world that will tell you (when you scan the barcode) whether the product is green (no evil plastics), orange (phasing out evil plastics) or red (evil plastics abound).
To make the app functional in South Africa I need information. I need to know all the different types of toothpaste, soaps, shampoos, body washes etc there are out there and I need to know what they have in them. So, it would be super helpful if you could explore in to the depths of your cupboards and tell me about your stock of personal hygiene stuff. AND ask all your friends to do so too, pretty please.
I need the following, (but if it seems a hassle, just send me a reasonably good picture of the front and back of the product and I will sleuth what I need from the picture):
- barcode
- retailer name
- manufacturer
- product name
- plastic ingredients (do they contain: polyethylene (PE), Polypropylene (PP), Nylon, Polymethyl Methacrylate (PMMA) or Polythylene Terphthalate (PET)?)
So, get to digging out your body glitter and foot scrub, deodorant and shaving products... I want to know all about them. I promise not to judge and it would be especially helpful if you do happen to have products that have plastic in so I can let people know about it. This needs to be South Africa only (sorry - supposedly barcodes are different in different countries, but I think we should double check this in Namibia because they are similar shops?)
I look forward to hearing from you, easiest if you email me on shampton@ioisa.org... or my personal email address (that I don't really want to put on the internet for everyone to see).
Let's BEAT THE MICROBEAD!!!!