With such a push against single use plastic and mirco plastics etc. Why is glitter left untouched? surely it has to be one of the worse plastic pollutants. Currently getting our Christmas shop ready, and its on everything and gets everywhere!
Not all kinds of glitter is made of plastic ? AFAIK one of the oldest and most popular sources of glitter is mica, which is a mineral (or rather a group of minerals) ?
Glitter is not a major micro plastic source, and people who buy glitter are probably not people who are worried about micro plastics anyways. Car tires are so much more of a micro plastics source that it’s almost not worth worrying about other sources until we figure that one out.
It’s also one of the most useful things we’ve ever made. Medical devices alone. The problem is mismanagement and overuse for profit by bad actors who lied to the world and said not to worry cause it’s all being reused again and again in this closed feedback loop called recycling
Tl;dr There is active research into cellulose nanocrystals for glitter, which would still have some ecologically negative impacts, but otherwise everything on the market is likely greenwashing, to various degrees.
The thing about glitter is, that it is often the waste from other processes cut up finely. You need those processes to use environmentally safe sheets of shiny paper.
I’d be surprised if there is, seeing as glitter is made from plastic and aluminium
It’s also apparently used in certain types of kitchen surfaces (quartz or granite if i’m not mistaken) to give them a sparkly finish, not too sure people would be happy to find their kitchen surfaces shine “biodegraded” and looking duller after half a century lol
I’d buy it for 30x the price. 10 years after having two girls get ready for the millennium in my bathroom (which involved the liberal spraying of glitter) I could still find that shit in crevices.
Seeing the comments here and people don’t even realise how widespread glitter is. It’s in everything and used in a variety of industries. From pharmaceuticals to construction, to transport, vehicles, military… in fact the one of the biggest consumers of glitter is kept secret so who knows, could be the military. It won’t surprise me. We really need to find an alternative.
Interesting. Not surprising, but that’s one I didn’t think about.
Still, that’s one use that’s not making anything worse, right? I mean, that counter is going to be used for decades, and when it does go to the landfill, the glitter in it is hardly going to make a difference.
from wiki: Modern glitter is usually manufactured from the combination of aluminum and plastic which is rarely recycled and finds its way into the aquatic habitats eventually becoming ingested by animals, leading some scientists to call for bans on plastic glitter.[8][9][10][11]
Overall, there is just not a lot of plastic in glitter. It’s incredible thin. It’s like aluminium foil, while we use a lot of meters of foil as households, the kg used is quite little given the surface. And glitter is the same. Getting everyone to buy one less plastic chair is more than they’ll use up in glitter over their entire life, basically.
Like, I’m not saying glitter is not a problematic and rather needless product, but on the list of problematic and rather needless products to get people away from it’s quite far down the list.
The concern is that glitter is smaller and harder to dispose of responsibly. It's likely to end up polluting the ground or the water, as opposed to something like a chair, which, having less surface area, and being disposed of as a whole piece after some decades, is not actually going to bleed that much.
The biggest culprits are probably polyester and acrylic fabrics, plus tires… and there isn’t likely to be a will to do anything about those. But yeah, glitter is annoying.
Polyester is too, but it’s a substantial and noticeable difference and improvement (a milestone even) as a life comfort. Glitter is just nice to look at.
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