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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Some scientists want to ban glitter [livescience.com], a microplastic [wikipedia.org] 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 [valleynewslive.com]. 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 [livescience.com].

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 [noaa.gov] and Plymouth University [plymouth.ac.uk] pages on microplastics.

Also at NYT [nytimes.com] and National Geographic [nationalgeographic.com].

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