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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: 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?