People be receiving fewer glittery Christmas cards this year as harmful microplastics have been banned across the European Union.
The European Commission has outlawed the sale of plastics smaller than five millimetres and that are intentionally added to products but do not dissolve or break down naturally.
Had a craft project involving some glitter, bought 3x 10 mL of glitters, and feel like I have enough for my whole life, it’s great to fight single user plastic, but I feel like that cheap shoes a lot of polyester/plastic cause more microplastic than glitters
But glitters are also one of the most pointless and useless forms of small plastics.
At least cheap shoes benefit people who need shoes and can’t afford to buy expensive ones. Nobody needs glitter for literally anything.
I fully agree with you but allow me to insert a personal experience here.
For years, I bought cheap sneakers. There was no store offering name brands and I wasn’t motivated to do a 100km round trip to go buy footwear. So I would go through a pair of shoes every two months, if I was lucky.
At €20 a pair, assuming I would wear out 6 pairs in a year, that is €120.
When a name brand shoe store finally arrived here, a pair of sneakers of decent quality start at €55, €40 if on sale.
I bought a pair of shoes there one year back; only slight wear signs are starting to show. I’ve been saving €10 a month to eventually replace the sneakers. At this point, I have enough money saved to buy two pairs.
It hurts but getting a better quality pair of shoes can save both money and some garbage.
It’s funny you mention shoes…
Yes, but its not an either/or situation. There are alternatives to glitter that are biodegradable. Glitter generally serves no purpose that other more environmentally sound products can’t fill. It’s for kids art and short term decoration.
Cheap shoes allow some people to buy shoes. We should look at cutting down on cheap plastic fast fashion but that’s a harder cookie to crack without side effects that could be quite devastating to some people.
One cheap plastic step at a time.
It’s a start. Certainly not the most ambitious start but it bans utterly useless products that nobody will miss.
Shoes are actually useful and they tend to emit microplastics from the sole. You’d need a scalable way to fix their soles without limiting poor people’s access to footwear. As far as I know there’s, as yet, no real, sustainable, scalable alternative to rubber soles. The only thing the EU can do here, is to discourage fast fashion and invest in manufacturers working on alternatives until they have, say, 20% market share.
Leather soles.
I know, I know, but it is far a more sturdy material than rubber and bio degradable, with a very long wear life.
The same techniques used to make a good comfortable shoe out of plastics can be applied to leather and natural materials.
I know people that have shoes and boots with more than twenty years of use (live in rural area, with shepperds and farmers). Require a good deal of care and some maintenance but can last a life time.
These bans are 100% about shifting responsibility to us as individuals instead of putting it on those actually responsible, rather than about actually solving any environmental problem.
Why are you saying that? These bans are a push for manufacturers to produce more environmentally-friendly products. They are only affecting consumers insofar as consumers can’t buy some of these products, such as glitter cards for a while.
Compare that to e.g. separating household waste which is indeed a shift of responsibility to consumers. Manufacturers merrily continue melting together three types of plastic and gluing some cardboard on top, while consumers are supposed to be responsible for separating and recycling.
because that’s the reality
no, if they wanted to do that they would ban manufacturing.
no, people can still buy whatever the fuck they want on the internet since these laws are categorically not enforceable. So I’ll say again - these kinds of bans are 100% greenwashing bullshit designed specifically to have no other real impact other than shifting responsibility and attention away from and allowing capitalists to continue uninterrupted.
If you can understand that, I don’t see why you’re confused by the same exact principle being applied elsewhere. Law and policy makers do not serve you, they serve capitalism.
Since the EU can’t ban manufacture in non-EU countries either and there’s no way to effectively check individual parcels, banning all glitter manufacture would have the same issue, people would still be able to buy this stuff on foreign websites.
Because it’s not the same thing. This affects manufacturers of products containing glitter. Consumers are only affected insofar as they can now either go out of their way to buy glitter for canonically ugly crafts projects (passing judgment here) or produce slightly less ugly crafts projects without glitter.
I am not going to argue that producing this legislation is the wisest use of EU bureaucrats’s time. It’s certainly not. They could have worked on regulating the single biggest source of microplastics, i.e. car/truck tires (via car weight reductions, tire formulation regulation, or even a small vacuum behind the wheels). Or they could have gone for cosmetics (where you can just ban them outright for a number of product classes, e.g. shampoo/shower gel is used a ton and simply doesn’t need silicones etc.).
But I also do not see it as a blame-shifting piece of legislation. They just chipped away at an easy target that does not have much lobby, unlike with automotive or cosmetics topics.