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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday December 03 2017, @09:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the impossible-tasks dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 03 2017, @11:04PM (3 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday December 03 2017, @11:04PM (#604835)

    Reminds me of chaff cutters for radar tracking missile lock evasion - super cool from the tech front: a spool of material is fed through a high speed cutter that tunes the length of the chaff bits according to the wavelength of the locked radar signal, makes a huge cloud of tuned metal confetti in seconds. Of course, metal confetti is much faster to bio-degrade than the wreckage of an airplane that's been successfully targeted by a missile...

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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Sunday December 03 2017, @11:32PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 03 2017, @11:32PM (#604843) Journal

    Of course, metal confetti is much faster to bio-degrade than the wreckage of an airplane that's been successfully targeted by a missile...

    Depends. I mean, look... if the missile has enough grunt (and/or the target plane has enough explosives on board), the "wreckage" will be reduced to pieces the size of glitter.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday December 04 2017, @01:26PM (1 child)

    by TheRaven (270) on Monday December 04 2017, @01:26PM (#605012) Journal
    I have just seen the greatest economic engine of the next decade: The combination of the military-industrial complex and the environmental lobby, arguing that all weapons must be powerful enough to completely atomise their targets, to reduce pollution caused by war.
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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 04 2017, @01:57PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday December 04 2017, @01:57PM (#605026)

      If they can make fusion bombs without the fission stage, I think we've got a winner here...

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