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Some scientists want to ban glitter, a microplastic that can contribute to contamination of the world's oceans:
It's sparkly, it's festive and some scientists want to see it swept from the face of the Earth.
Glitter should be banned, researcher Trisia Farrelly, a senior lecturer in environment and planning at Massey University in New Zealand, told CBS. The reason? Glitter is made of microplastic, a piece of plastic less than 0.19 inches (5 millimeters) in length. Specifically, glitter is made up of bits of a polymer called polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which goes by the trade name Mylar. And though it comes in all sizes, glitter is typically just a millimeter or so across, Live Science previously reported.
Microplastics make up a major proportion of ocean pollution. A 2014 study in the open-access journal PLOS ONE estimated that there are about 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic weighing a total of 268,940 tons (243,978 metric tons) floating in the world's seas. Microplastics made up 92.4 percent of the total count.
NOAA and Plymouth University pages on microplastics.
Also at NYT and National Geographic.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday December 03 2017, @09:28PM (28 children)
What they should really do is ban all non-essential plastics and styrofoam, period.
For bike helmets, yes, allow it. For food containers and grocery bags, ban it.
I always laughed at the hypocrisy of surfers, they're almost all environmentalists, and yet the forming of the foam cores of surfboards is an extremely destructive process to the atmosphere. You'd think that somebody would have come up with a better way by now.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @09:38PM (1 child)
Seems to me that the volume of 1 board is pretty small.
Do a lot of surfers have more that 1 board?
Do boards get broken and need replacing that often?
Cali tends to outlaw nasty chemicals.
Didn't that happen for surfboard manufacturers many years ago?
Pretty sure that you're just hand-waving.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday December 03 2017, @10:20PM
Casual or non-surfer spotted. The answers are yes and yes.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @09:41PM (9 children)
The market decides.
This is a problem of poorly defined property rights. Whose rights are being infringed? Who is doing the infringing and must therefore pay or change his ways? Because the property rights are so poorly defined in this matter, nobody knows what to do except to turn to the vote-grabbing bureaucrats and scream for them to send out the men with guns to set things "right" (for various definitions of "right").
That is no way to run a civilization.
Gulp a glittery cock, SoylentNews, you sparkling turd.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @10:33PM (8 children)
You got modded down, but I think property rights is the best way to solve this problem as well, especially given that men aren't angels.
Property owners should be able to bring class action lawsuits against polluters (including manufacturers of products that are known to cause environmental problems such as glitter). The damages sought should be compensation for the cost of cleaning the affected properties.
If rivers start catching fire, as they tend to do when capitalism runs amok, all interested parties such as property owners along the river should be able to sue all polluters contributing to the situation for the cost of building a giant graphene filter or whatever it takes to clean the flow of the entire river as it passes through. If that bankrupts the polluters, meh.
Our current system just gives them a slap on the wrist and bad PR.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Monday December 04 2017, @12:50AM (6 children)
I'm not sure if you're being entirely serious or not, but environmental policy should never be decided by free market capitalism - not even in the ways you describe although they would admittedly be a step up from the current situation.
Lots of people only care about what's going on in their back yard. Under your system, areas with no human habitation are fair game to be relentlessly polluted. Other animals aren't able to file lawsuits, lobby governments or form peaceful demonstrations. That's why legislation is needed to speak on their behalf. Except when they're the product, non human animals get very little from free market capitalism and lose a very great deal.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @01:19AM (2 children)
Your opinion doesn't matter; what matters is whether your activity in this universe is productive for society.
If you think you can make a case that some "pristine" landscape is worth preserving as such, then make that case like anybody else who is seeking to make his impression on the world: Put up or shut up; under Capitalism, you have prove the worth of your opinion.
(Score: 3, Informative) by acid andy on Monday December 04 2017, @01:54AM
So say you. There's more to this universe than human society, you know.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @04:29PM
Now it is clear, you get nodded troll because that is exactly what you appear to be. Go under your bridge and play with you little contracts you clueless idjit.
(Score: 1) by Gault.Drakkor on Monday December 04 2017, @09:10AM (1 child)
I agree that environmental policy shouldn't be decided by free market capitalism.
But I like the idea of: tax what you don't want/like. So tax the use proportional to the clean up cost. If the company does cradle to grave, give them proportional tax break to what they take back.
Taxing is better then banning. Rather then sending a strongly worded letter saying "bad company". Taxes allow you to say: "You want to dump/use a tonne of glitter?, no problem. Here is the bill for clean up costs." It internalizes the some of the externalities for companies.
In this way,(tax what you don't want,) response to policy can be decided by free market capitalism.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday December 04 2017, @12:55PM
In an ideal world, I agree. You wouldn't want to leave any loopholes that let companies get around the tax, but that's exactly the same problem you'd face as with enforcing any other kind of environmental regulation. My other concern would be making sure the clean-up is fully effective and is never something that's going to be cut back or axed by a greedy future government eying up all that potential tax revenue.
Off topic, but your point about taxing what you don't like reminded me about that story a little while back about wanting to restrict pr0n because some of it is considered to negatively discriminate against women. Similar issues come up around diversity in the tech industry. So how about, instead of banning discrimination, tax it. Then take a percentage of the tax and use it to pay thousands of people to vote on whether or not something is an example of discrimination.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 04 2017, @01:51PM
The environment is the butt-end of the joke of capitalism.
"Development of Natural Resources" is just a "working hard" label for exploitation. When those resources are renewable, it's slightly better, but still displacing the natural ecosystem in favor of economic productivity, and that displacement is an externalized cost.
Pollution is the ultimate externalized cost. When a factory makes a ton of 1mm mylar glitter that sells at retail for $1 per 100 grams, that's roughly a million dollars of "retail value." Nevermind the emissions involved in manufacture, distribution and retail sales; when that ton of glitter ends up in the environment for 500 years, what's the externalized cost? Hard to say, but high. How much of that cost is borne by the glitter supply chain? Easy to say: zero.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday December 04 2017, @01:21PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @09:45PM (3 children)
Duh! That's why kung-fu panda uses bamboo!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @09:55PM (2 children)
I was thinking of balsa.
Problem being that I don't think that it will grow near the surfing consumers.
The impact of shipping would likely offset any environmental gains. 8-(
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday December 03 2017, @10:56PM (1 child)
Being serious here, there are a handful of hipsters who surf on plywood boards.
Except that they're not hipsters, because hipsters are pusillanimous punks. The plywood surfers are the true super-autists of surfing, and they do it well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @06:58AM
There's balsawood boards too. Fucking AMAZING ride.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @10:31PM
The market decides.
This is a problem of poorly defined property rights. Whose rights are being infringed? Who is doing the infringing and must therefore pay or change his ways? Because the property rights are so poorly defined in this matter, nobody knows what to do except to turn to the vote-grabbing bureaucrats and scream for them to send out the men with guns to set things "right" (for various definitions of "right").
That is no way to run a civilization.
Gulp a glittery cock, SoylentNews, you sparkling turd.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 03 2017, @11:00PM
One surf board every year or two for 40 years per person isn't so bad. Beats the hell out of carving them from Koa wood.
The styrofoam insulation that ships with dry-ice packed foods, that's some heinous usage. And, at least in my line of work and personal lifestyle, it seems like I end up consuming more than one surfboard worth of styrofoam as packing for flat-screen monitors and other big things per year. Those are applications that could use other materials for a slightly higher short term financial cost, and much lower long term cost when you add in the externalities of disposing of the mass quantities of stryrofoam and environmental impacts of its whole life-cycle.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Disagree) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 03 2017, @11:12PM (9 children)
As for grocery bags, pick your poison:
Paper, much more material used to carry the same groceries. Pound per pound paper is more environmentally friendly than plastic, but when you consider the multiple of paper required to carry the same groceries, it's a huge loser.
Thin plastic, horrid looking wasteful appearing single-use bags - but massively efficient. You can actually use them two or three times each, if you care, and overall they're probably the least impactful option to the environment per grocery-year of totage.
Reusable bags: stylish, shows the user cares, theoretically you buy once and use forever, but in real life not so much. Sooner or later they require washing, repair (when is the last time your mom or wife fixed a bag with needle and thread?) and they do eventually wear out. And, when that happens, how many groceries have they carried, really? Not in an ideal world where the bag is used optimally until it is completely worn out, in the real world where bags get lost, forgotten, left out in the rain to rot, etc.? Stack up the equivalent thin plastic bags to carry the same amount of groceries and you're usually winning with thin plastic again.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @04:07AM
I've never had to wash or repair a reusable bag, and they hold way more groceries than plastic bags do. The only problem I have with them is remembering to bring them.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday December 04 2017, @11:01AM (6 children)
My wife chose the canvas bag option. It's been years now and they show no significant degradation. None lost or left to rot.
Of course, rotting = return to nature. What you really don't want is continuing to exist in more or less the same form after being discarded.
To be fair, if the disposable bags are recycled, the environmental impact is much lower.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 04 2017, @01:29PM (5 children)
If you are conscientious with the canvas bags, they can be better. Our #1 problem with the reusable bags is that they're not always handy - sometimes we get a $50 load of groceries, sometimes $400, and even if we have enough reusable bags to carry $400, are they all in the car that we took to the store that day? Did we remember to bring them all in when we started? Worse: my wife sells "designer" bags, so with the pyramid commission scheme on the price of those, you're looking at a whole other expense (good for the economy, I suppose, but the jet travel that the top level commission is paying for certainly is not good for the environment...)
The thing that really complicates the matter is that: single use recyclable can be better, not always, but in some cases it really is clearly better for the environment.
Now, glitter - that lacks an effective recycling channel, not even biodegradation.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday December 04 2017, @05:44PM (4 children)
It's not that uncommon that we have one or 2 "overflow" items that end up in plastic, but that's just a bag rather than a fistfull. It still comes out ahead.
As for glitter, it should probably use biodegradable starch based plastic as the backing.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 04 2017, @07:34PM (3 children)
Should, but I can already hear the moans: "oh, the good old glitter we used to have would just rinse right off, but this new stuff gets all gooey and sticks to everything..."
I dated a girl in the 1980s who wore sparkly makeup - I'm just now picturing those shiny little dots jamming up the liver capillaries of some fish, and the fish that eats its corpse, and the fish that eats that corpse... for the next 500 years.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday December 04 2017, @09:40PM (2 children)
The breakdown actually takes a few months of exposure to the environment. Water won't turn it gummy.
Just add the glitter to horse feed then tell people you have a rare horn-less unicorn.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 04 2017, @10:37PM (1 child)
Breakdown of the starch based plastics, yes. Breakdown of the current mylar? I'm seeing somewhat believable references to the 350-600 year ranges.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:30AM
Yes, I meant of the starch based plastics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @12:56PM
> when is the last time your dad or husband fixed a bag with needle and thread?
FTFY