Beat the Microbead

Plastic Soup Foundation

About this app

The Beat the Microbead app is the fastest way to learn if your cosmetics and personal care products contain plastic ingredients. This app uses state-of-the-art text recognition technology. Just scan the ingredients of your products and check them for microplastics. Not only that, but you can also get to know microplastic-free brands certified by us.

How does it work?

It’s straightforward: you can scan products with four easy steps:
- Find the ingredients list on your product.
- Position the full list within your camera frame.
- Make sure the ingredients are clear to read.
- Take a picture to scan!

A traffic light rating system

- RED: Products that contain microplastics.
- ORANGE: Products that contain what we call “sceptical” microplastics. With this, we mean synthetic polymers for which there is not enough information available.
- GREEN: Products that do not contain microplastics.

Help us enrich our database!

Every time you add a product to our database, you help us build a case against microplastics. With every product information, we can create evidence and convince authorities about the extensive use of plastic ingredients. A bit of extra effort on your side makes you a part of the fight against microplastics in cosmetics and care products. So, go ahead, scan the barcode of your product and help us get some more information!

By adding the products to our database, you can also discover our certified microplastic-free brands. These brands have their entire range of products free of all known microplastic ingredients.

Why is it important?

Plastic in cosmetics is a global problem! Microplastics are hardly visible ingredients that pollute our planet & may pose health risks. These microplastics, hardly visible to the naked eye, flow straight from the bathroom drain into the sewer system. Microplastics are not biodegradable, and once they enter the (marine) environment, they are almost impossible to remove.

Sea animals absorb or eat microplastics; these particles are passed along the marine food chain. Since humans are ultimately at the top of this food chain, it is likely that we also ingest microplastics.

Using body washes or cosmetics that contain microplastics can put the ocean, ourselves, and our children at risk! With this app, you can get aware of this issue and make environmentally friendly choices.

Who is behind this app?

The collaborators behind this app include the following partners:

Plastic Soup Foundation: NGO based in Amsterdam, initiators of the worldwide campaign “Beat the Microbead”. Their mission: No plastic in our water or our bodies!

PINCH: a renowned mobile development agency from Amsterdam that is proud of their work for the Plastic Soup Foundation.

Ratings and reviews

New version is a huge improvement, but camera doesn't focus. Update: yes now it works! That's the most awesome response time. Wouldn't using OCR produce a lot of false negatives? Maybe it's possible to visually show what text is recognized in a taken picture, like the Google Translate app does. Now that I'm on the feedback role: maybe don't show the browser/link part on app pages, this makes it look a bit cheap and seems redundant.

I really want to like this app, but it is geared towards the makers, and not towards the user. Why can't I start with scanning a barcode, and get immediate results or the option to do the ocr thing? I am NOT going to stop for a minute to scan, crop, and again (!) photograph every product I CONSIDER buying, especially since every darn product is then said to be "already in our database". It is wasting my time and my battery. Won't uninstall just yet, but it needs dramatic UX improvements.

Love it! Normally it would be too complicated to detect on our own microplastics on product ingredients. Also I love the informations you included and the brand list with plastic free products... very insightful 😊 maybe one day you could improve it by switchinh the scanner of barcode with the ingredients (some apps for diets and nutrition do it already, yazio for example)!

What's new

A small update for Android 13 users, who no longer had the option to use an existing photo for scanning ingredients. Your feedback about the app is welcome and we try to include as much as possible in next updates.