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.
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.