The biggest problem with microbeads is that they're designed to go down the drain. They're so small, most water treatment plants can't capture them so billions are ending up in our waterways everyday. And even worse, these tiny bits of plastic act like sponges soaking up the toxics around them so a single microbead can end up being a million times more toxic than the water around it. Once in our waterways, they get eaten by fish and other animals and could make their way right back to your sushi! 

This video from The Story of Stuff claims that microbead harm does not end with animals in the ocean, the toxic damage can extend to humans as we ingest seafood from affected oceans and waterways. From this statement I then pulled four key terms; microbeads, toxicity, bioavailability, and sewage treatment.

To gather more information on the current state of the debate on microbeads, I used the search engine Google and advanced searched “microbead”, "toxicity", "bioavailability" and "sewage treatment"; this key word produced a multitude of results (over 500,000). When I limited my search to news stories, and then looked at the first two pages of Google results, I was presented with articles that advocated against the use of microbeads in cosmetic products – there were no articles that supported the use of these tiny plastic beads. Some articles outlined the facts about microbeads (what they are, their environmental impacts, products that contain them, etc.), some were reaching out for support on the ban of microbeads, and others were factual articles examining laws and bills (either passed or in progress) to ban microbead sales. What’s more, some news stories even used their “microbead-free” products as a selling point – this reiterated to me the relevancy of this issue. 

Next, I focused the research of my controversy to the a specific debate. I once again used the advanced search option in Google to combine key terms "microbeads" and "California". The results again lead to the controversy surrounding the implementation of law AB 888. This law states that starting on January 1, 2020 the sale of microbead products will be banned in the state of California. A person found guilty of breaking this new law could be subject to a civil penalty of up to $2,500 per day for each violation. In the state of California, the law must pass through a series of senates as a bill, receiving a majority vote at each level, until it reaches the final level - the assembly floor. If the bill then receives a majority vote at the assembly floor level it can then become a law. During this process there are obviously some senators for the ban of microbeads and some against - thus creating a controversy. The later aspects of this story map will explore the various players - from activist, to scientists, to senators - in this controversy and their stand point on the microbead debate.

After getting an introduction into the microbead controversy through google and the media, my next step was to dive into the debate going on with the so called experts - the scientists. I conducted a search in the academic search engine Scopus. I searched the key term "microbeads" with a focus on article titles, abstracts and keywords. This search yielded over 4,000 results. As one can imagine this is an overwhelming amount of scholarly information to sift through - so i used a tool called ScienceScape to aid in visualizing and understanding the keywords, authors, and subject areas where microbeads were appearing. Below are some graphs that I extracted from Scopus to better depict how microbeads have been appearing in academia and the 'who, what, when, where, and how' of the scholarly history of the debate on microbeads. (Unfortunately my computer would not allow me to extract from Scopus and better visualize in Gephi. I may need some assistance on this issue.)