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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: 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.
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