Well, here’s an inconvenient truth: turns out a common ingredient found in most sunscreens is slowly killing our reefs.
Thanks for the PSA THAT WE NEVER GOT UNTIL NOW.
Because the thought of sucking the life out of something as magical as the Great Barrier Reef makes us want to cry 4eva, here’s the main ingredient you want to look out for / avoid when you read the label of any sunscreen: OXYBENZONE.
A UV filtering ingredient present in 3,500 brands of sunscreen sold worldwide is, according to new research published in the Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, toxic to baby coral (GOD HOLD US) because it alters their DNA, making the reefs more susceptible to fatal bleaching.
It can also cause said baby coral to crawl into its own skeleton and die, which is officially one of the saddest things you’ll ever read.
Sea water testing found concentrations of oxybenzone were 12 x higher than is A-OK in Hawaii and the Caribbean, but Australia ain’t far behind.
As if you weren’t feeling bad enough already, between 6 million kgs – 14 million kgs of sunscreen lotion ends up in coral reefs each year.
It could be time to switch to organic or mineral sun protection, which uses zinc oxides and titanium dioxides that physically block UV rather than chemically.
Via SBS.
Image Via Getty/ Dmitry Miroshnikov.
