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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: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @02:18PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @02:18PM (#605035)

    There are many things that you don't dream, oh self-described philosopher. And, many more that you cannot dream, because your mind is much to small to imagine them. Please, confine yourself to inane discussions about angels dancing on the heads of pins.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Monday December 04 2017, @04:24PM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Monday December 04 2017, @04:24PM (#605107) Journal

    "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto".

    C'mon, AC, admit it. When I wrote "Django" your first thoughts were Jamie Fox and Quentian Tarantino, were they not? Why do Americans persist in being so stupid and anti-philosophy? Even Harry Potter was changed from "Philosopher's Stone" to "Sorcerer's Stone" for the American market.