Glitter is a crafter’s dream but the environment’s nightmare. It starts as a sheet of thin plastic. Then it’s coated with aluminum to make it shiny, followed by a layer of colorful ink. Finally, it’s cut into teeny-tiny pieces. Each tiny sparkle is actually a piece of microplastic, which can slip through filtration systems and pollute water sources.
But a new type of glitter, called Bioglitter, has all of the sparkle without the pollution. Instead of plastic, Bioglitter starts with a sheet of cellulose made of wood pulp. That makes it biodegradable. It breaks down within a few weeks. Microplastics, by comparison, can take hundreds of years to break down. “Glitter represents only a tiny fraction of plastic pollution,” says Andrew Thompson, a technical director who works with Bioglitter. “But we feel we need to do our bit to tackle the problem.”