Study: Sunscreen killing coral reefs

MOLOAA — New research about sunscreen’s destructive effects on coral reefs has Sharon Eacott thinking twice before slathering it on.

She doesn’t, however, want to get sunburned.

So Eacott, whose home stands on the shores of Moloaa Bay, wears a hat and seeks shade when she’s outdoors. She also goes for her daily swim in the early morning hours to avoid the blaring rays of the sun.

When she does apply sunscreen, she is circumspect. Her husband is so adverse to the goopy white stuff that he won’t even help apply it in the hard-to-reach spots. This sometimes results in Eacott’s back taking on a slightly darker hue than the rest of her body.

In addition to her desire to care for the reef outside her kitchen window, Eacott is wary of chemicals used in some sunblocks that have been shown to increase the risk of skin cancer.

“More and more studies are showing how bad sunscreen is for you,” she said. “And by me, I mean everything. The reef, my whole world.”

Recently, Eacott thought she had found the answer to her sunscreen dilemma. At the Coconut Festival in Kapaa earlier this month she found a vendor selling Reef Safe — a biodegradable sunblock that claims to be non-toxic to sealife. She bought 10 bottles.

A few weeks later Eacott learned that, according to some scientists, Reef Safe sunscreen may not be reef safe at all.

Last Tuesday, a new study came out that concludes that the chemicals in even one drop of sunscreen are enough to damage coral reefs. The ingredient oxybenzone, a common UV-filtering compound, contributes to the bleaching crisis that Hawaii’s reefs are experiencing right now, the study said. Oxybenzone can also harm of fish and other wildlife.

The team of international researchers found high concentrations of the chemical in Hawaii’s near-shore waters.

“Any small effort to reduce oxybenzone pollution could mean that a coral reef survives a long, hot summer, or that a degraded area recovers,” study co-author Craig Downs, of the nonprofit scientific organization Haereticus Environmental Laboratory in Virginia, told The Washington Post.

This news was troubling to Eacott, who thought she had done her due diligence to find a sunscreen that won’t harm the aquatic environment she so loves.

Neither she nor her husband could decipher the tiny lettering on the Reef Safe sunscreen bottle, so they emailed the customer service department operated by parent company Tropical Seas to find out whether Reef Safe contains oxybenzone. It must not, they figured. They just wanted to be assured.

The customer service team sent this reply: “Yes, our products do contain a percentage of oxybenzone. We’re assuming you are inquiring, because of the recent study that just came out?

“This is more of the same old witch hunt that has been going on for awhile, just a new study is being posted and sensationalized by the media.

“Rest assured Reef Safe has been tested on all sea life, including corals in 2008 with a marine biologist that we sub contracted and we had no stunted growth or death or bleaching on six species of corals.”

The email goes on to say that recent studies tested the individual chemicals contained in sunscreens like Reef Safe, whereas Reef Safe tests its entire product, in which all of the ingredients, mainly botanicals, are bonded together.

“You cannot claim a sunscreen lotion is bad if you are just testing one ingredient, especially when they are using that one ingredient at 100 percent, when that is massively higher than any sunscreen lotions contain,” the email said.

The conflicting accounts from the sunscreen company and the study authors have left Eacott frustrated and confused. For now, she’s siding with the scientists behind the study. That means it’s back to hats and shade trees as her primary methods of sun protection.

“It’s easy to be misled, that’s for sure,” Eacott said. “We read this stuff, we follow along and try to do our best to buy a sunscreen that’s not going to harm the reef and we still have no idea if it’s going to harm the reef.”