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It ’s sparkly , it ’s festal and some scientist want to see it swept from the side of the Earth .

Glitter should be banned , research worker Trisia Farrelly , a senior reader in environment and planning at Massey University in New Zealand , tell apart CBS . The reason ? Glitter is made of microplastic , a piece of music of plastic less than 0.19 inch ( 5 millimeters ) in length . Specifically , glitter is made up of mo of a polymer called polythene terephthalate ( PET ) , which goes by the craft name Mylar . And though it comes in all sizes , glitter is typically just a millimetre or so across , Live Science previously reported .

Kids� hands holding piles of glitter

Kids' crafts may have to find another way to shimmer.

Microplastics make up a major proportion of ocean defilement . A 2014 study in the subject - entree daybook PLOS ONE estimated that there are about 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic weigh a total of 268,940 net ton ( 243,978 metric tons ) floating in the globe ’s seas . Microplastics made up 92.4 percentage of the total enumeration .

Most of those microplastics were scrap that had slough off charge plate items that were originally large , like water bottles , sportfishing train or plastic shopping bag , that study found .

Microplastics are a job because maritime life story mistakes the be adrift subatomic particle for food . Eurasian perch larvae , for good example , often choose to feed charge plate over its even diet , harmonize to a 2016 study in the journal Science . Unsurprisingly , that study found , a charge card - base diet was not great for the Pisces ’s farseeing - terminal figure health and survival . Even zooplankton , the root of the sea food chain , have been observed eating plastics .

a close-up of a material with microplastics embedded in it

Original article onLive skill .

Plastic waste by the ocean

Galactic trash orbiting Earth.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa as seen underneath a microscope.

Large swirls of green seen on the ocean�s surface from space

a researcher bends over and points to the boundary between a body of water and ice

a landscape photo of an outcrop of Greenland�s Isua supracrustal belt, shows valley with a pool of water in the center and a coastline and ocean beyond

Petermann is one of Greenland�s largest glaciers, lodged in a fjord that, from the height of its mountain walls down to the lowest point of the seafloor, is deeper than the Grand Canyon.

A researcher stands inside the crystal-filled cave known as the Pulpí Geode — the largest geode on Earth.

A polar bear in the Arctic.

A golden sun sets over the East China Sea, near Okinawa, Japan.

Vescovo (left) recently completed the Five Deeps Expedition with his latest dive into the deepest part of the Arctic Ocean.

An image comparing the relative sizes of our solar system�s known dwarf planets, including the newly discovered 2017 OF201

an illustration showing a large disk of material around a star

a person holds a GLP-1 injector

A man with light skin and dark hair and beard leans back in a wooden boat, rowing with oars into the sea

an MRI scan of a brain

A photograph of two of Colossal�s genetically engineered wolves as pups.

two ants on a branch lift part of a plant