Is sunscreen sustainable?

The warm weather is upon us, which means you may be spending more time outside getting some fresh air and sunshine! Especially since we’re all cooped up indoors with COVID-19, it’s so important to spend some time outside for your own wellbeing. That said, you should also be protecting your skin from the sun’s harmful rays. But is sunscreen sustainable?

Before we get into today’s post, I wanted to ask a favour from you. I have created a short survey for youth (ages 12-25) to understand their perceptions of climate change and the barriers youth feel are preventing them from contributing to their community’s climate action initiatives. I would really appreciate if you could fill out this anonymous survey here. Thank you in advance! 🙂

So, sunscreen. As something we put all over our bodies including our faces and on children, you would think that sunscreen is safe to use. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Let’s dive into the question, “is sunscreen sustainable?” to see what answers and solutions we can find.

First, what’s in sunscreen?

Active ingredients

The most important ingredients in sunscreen are the ones that filter out UV radiation from the sun, blocking its rays from interacting with your skin. There are six main ingredients that do this, known as active ingredients which usually are combined in some form. Active ingredients include oxybenzone, avobenzone, octisalate, octocrylene, homosalate and octinoxate. 

Aside from the fact that most of these ingredients have have been insufficiently tested for epidermal use (applying to your skin), oxybenzone is considered the most toxic ingredient from the bunch because of its ability to cause allergic skin reactions, endocrine dysregulation and birth defects. Other active filters are reported endocrine disruptors, reducing fertility. Octinoxate, another high-concern active ingredient, is reported to cause thyroid and behavioural changes in animal studies, along with endocrine disruption. 

Inactive ingredients 

Inactive ingredients make up 50 to 70 percent of sunscreens. One inactive ingredient that is worrisome is methylisothiazolinone, a preservative that often causes allergic reactions.

What does this mean for the environment?

Think about where you wear sunscreen most often: likely when going to the beach, or the pool. Even if you are just wearing it as you run everyday errands, at the end of the day you are washing that sunscreen off in the sink or shower. These toxic ingredients therefore end up in our lakes, oceans and rivers. You can consider it the invisible threat to marine and aquatic life, next to plastic pollution, rising ocean temperatures and eutrophication.

Coral reefs are already seriously threatened by climate change, and our sunscreens are worsening the problem. A 2016 study found oxybenzone and Benzophenone-2 are highly toxic to coral reefs and marine life. Some of the impacts to coral include abnormal growth in juveniles, endocrine dysruption causing abnormal skeletal growth, genotoxicity (DNA damage), increased susceptibility to coral bleaching. Other ingredients like zinc oxide or titanium oxide (found in mineral sunscreens) can cause coral bleaching and possibly be consumed by marine life, due to their minuscule size. 

Active chemicals impact other marine life. Juvenile mussels and algae experience growth deformations, and photosynthetic abilities in algae can also be impaired (i.e. it can’t make food to grow or oxygen). In sea urchins, immune and reproductive systems may be impaired, along with growth deformations. Fish experience reduced fertility and hormonal issues, and dolphins bioaccumulate the chemicals in their tissues, which can be passed onto offspring. 

When we swim in lakes and oceans, the sunscreen can wash off into waters, directly exposing aquatic life to these chemicals. These ingredients are not removed during municipal wastewater treatment, so they are discharged into oceans from treatment centres and boats. 

How can we protect our skin AND the environment?

In an ideal world, sunscreen producers will change their products to remove these harmful chemicals. While that can definitely happen, it is not happening any time soon. In 2018, Hawaii passed a bill to ban oxybenzone-containing sunscreens (but won’t be in effect until 2021 at the earliest), which is a huge step in a positive direction to protecting their at-risk coral reefs. That said, this ban is not universal, nor does it address the ongoing problem right now. That is why taking action at the individual level is so important to protect our marine and aquatic ecosystems. You can help do so in a few simple ways: