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: 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.
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