from the a-little-glitter-goes-a-long-way dept.
Glitter is used in a variety of decorative ways, including on clothing, in arts and crafts, and in cosmetics and body paint. Traditional glitter is a form of microplastic consisting of a plastic core made of polyester PET film, which is coated with aluminium and then covered with another thin plastic layer.
Along with other forms of single use microplastics, such as microbeads, there have been efforts to phase out PET glitter with the introduction of more biodegradable alternatives.
One version has a core of modified regenerated cellulose (MRC), sourced mainly from eucalyptus trees, but this is still coated with aluminium for reflectivity and then topped with a thin plastic layer. Another form is mica glitter, which is increasingly used in cosmetics.
However, this new study found that the effects of MRC and mica glitters on root length and chlorophyll levels were almost identical to those of traditional glitter.
Curse Oprah and her movie, A Wrinkle in Time!
Journal Reference:
Dannielle Senga Green, Megan Jefferson, Bas Boots, et al. All that glitters is litter? Ecological impacts of conventional versus biodegradable glitter in a freshwater habitat, Journal of Hazardous Materials (DOI: 10.1016/j.jhazmat.2020.124070)
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Bloopie on Friday October 16 2020, @12:24PM (1 child)
Bu . . . Bu . . . Bu . . . the virus was cured back in April. Don't you know that Vit-Uhhhh-Min Cee?
Hold on. There's spittle all over the screen. Wait while I wipe it off. Who put that there?
OK, I'm back. Don't you know that Vit-Uhhhh-Min Dee?
Now there's drool all over the screen. How did that get there? Someone is plotting against me. It's a plot!11!!111! They want to suppress the SCIENSCE!1!!111
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @12:32PM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @12:24PM (3 children)
Using a stone or using a plastic is not too much different. Maybe the latter just makes chemical crap that the former does not. But how is mica "biodegradable"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mica [wikipedia.org]
Furthermore, this is click-bait story. It's talking about glitter, NOT Research Finds Biodegradable Alternatives Are No Better for the Environment. Very false.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Friday October 16 2020, @12:30PM
Yeah the headline isn't just false it's dangerous as the gullible, intellectually-lazy might believe it and stop buying biodegradable alternatives (although I guess most of those types are more likely to already be consumerists than environmentalists, given the power of advertising).
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday October 16 2020, @03:15PM (1 child)
Here's the flipside to that very sound sentiment. This is not the first such research.
Biodegradable plastic bags [acs.org] and biodegradable PLA [acs.org] have both been found to have pretty bad dimensions for actually doing what it says on the tin: helping the environment, for example.
There's a meme in internet leftist circles that says "There's no ethical consumption under capitalism." I don't know if I wholly buy that sentiment, but it is more profitable to do some token R&D, brand yourself as green, and ignore actual environmental impacts than find major sources of harm and reduce them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @12:12AM
This is true, but the problem here is that the labeling on these products is misleading to the point of being false. If we required truth in labeling, these products could not be labeled biodegradable or compostable.
I.e., to be labeled compostable or biodegradable, it must break down at a similar rate to regular organic matter like kitchen scraps and grass clippings in a standard compost pile with no additional process or inputs. The resulting matter must be non-toxic and contain no components that would not be naturally occurring in similar concentrations as the result of composting regular organic matter.
If it is made of plastic (and not PET), it does not matter what it says on the package. The only place it is going is into the dump / environment, and that plastic is going to remain intact (possibly in tiny pieces) for centuries if not millennia. Polluting water, air, and soil, and being incorporated into plants and animals-- when it does not cause animals to starve to death from eating more plastic than food.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Friday October 16 2020, @12:25PM (2 children)
The sooner that pointless, wasteful shit goes out of fashion, the better. It's everywhere!
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @12:52PM (1 child)
There is a special place in hell for the inventor of glitter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @10:55PM
Is it a hell filled with loli succubi? If so, sign me up.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Friday October 16 2020, @12:30PM (10 children)
I haven't seen the movie; I have read the book. It contained a scene that I rank as one of the most chilling I've seen in fiction, in the land where order had taken over.
-- hendrik
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday October 16 2020, @02:38PM (8 children)
A friend who loved the book talked me in to watching the movie. It was horrible. Awful.
It belongs in the part of hell reserved for systemd.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday October 16 2020, @03:18PM (5 children)
Systemd is fine. I'm sorry you have to write slightly different commands to view the logs on your linux box now. That must be very hard on you.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @03:37PM (2 children)
It's not hard not writing them. Systemd violates the Unix Philosophy.
(Score: 3, Touché) by ikanreed on Friday October 16 2020, @11:47PM (1 child)
God help us that OS philosophy could possibly evolve at all in half a century.
What's next? GUIs? A readable tar command?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @02:09PM
You actually use readable flags outside scripts? Why?
Systemd would be fine if it worked, but half the time it doesn't, so it's easier to go with what works everywhere and is also stable and working for a few decades.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday October 16 2020, @04:39PM
It's popular to hate on systemd.
Just as it's popular to hate on Java.
I program every day in Java, and don't have any actual difficulties with systemd. It's not difficult to write systemd unit files for custom service starting. Launching multiple service instances of Apache Tomcat, from the same on disk Java and Tomcat runtimes, through the manipulation of environment variables.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @12:36AM
systemd is less broken today than it was when it was released too soon. But, it is taking over things like a cancer. Systemd has its own su, its own ntpd, its own dns, its own cron, its own incompatible replacement for limits, etc. WTH?!!!
When released, it broke the ability to fsck a disk on startup. So, if you ran a filesystem without a journal and had an unclean shutdown you were fucked. E.g., on embedded systems where you were running a std. fs, but didn't want to fry the flash.
When released, and still to this day, systemd claims sysvinit compatibility. But, it only starts things semi-reliably from sysvinit scripts. systemd does not properly shutdown things from sysvinit scripts. systemd puts things into a cgroup to track what belongs with which "unit". If you have a sysvinit script that starts/stops your database as a user other than root, systemd will start it, but will kill all the db processes BEFORE running the shutdown script. Thereby fucking all your data. The processes after the su are untracked by systemds cgroup tracking.
When released, systemd had no support for keyscipts, and Lennart said, "I don't use anything like that." Which led to lots of encrypted systems being unbootable. yay.
Systemd claimed support for fstab, which it still does not have due to race conditions that Lennart has stated he will not fix since it might make boot times slower (yeah, he really said that). If you use fuse filesystems like glusterfs (a cluster filesystem that uses fuse for access), good luck getting mounting on boot reliable. Lennart finally backed down (a little) and added some dependency switches that could be added as fs mount options that systemd would use to try to order mounts so the kernel fs that the fuse fs used as a backing store would be mounted before the fuse fs. It is still pretty nightmarish, since you have to explicitly list every service dep too.
systemd logind broke vtswitching from X to a vt. If you logged into the vt as the same user as X was running as, then later exited the vt with "exit", systemd logind would kill the session used for X too. You had to remember to use a different user if you also used vts until systemd finally fixed its shit. Or, purge systemd from your system which was my approach.
Every one of the above bit me personally. And, I could list at least 5 more. Systemd was/is buggy shit (the number of CVEs for systemd is staggering esp. when you compare to sysvinit which has been around for decades longer). systemd is a fact of life now if you work at a place that forces you to use it, but it isn't "good".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @03:32PM (1 child)
But I have Betamax.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday October 16 2020, @03:37PM
My batamax started wrinkling the tapes.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 16 2020, @06:24PM
A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet were childhood favorites. Meg and her little brother Charles Wallace were an inspiration. The recent film adaptation of the former with Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon were awful, and relied on watershed-destroying quantities of glitter to gloss over weak acting, non-existent directing, and gratuitous interlarding of preachy politics in the original story line.
Washington DC delenda est.