When I saw the following headline, I was shocked: “Glitter banned by Dorset children’s nursery chain.” Well, yes, I thought. As he should be. Why on earth was he allowed into a nursery chain in the first place? Not for the first time, the actual story bore no reference to the one I was expecting. This one is all to do with the environment.
Doubtless, the Tops Day Nursery will suffer grief from the red tops who will blame “political correctness gone mad”. Actually this is a very good move. The story reports that glitter is “almost impossible to remove from the environment”, that it can destroy marine life and get into the food chain. As there are over 20,000 nurseries in Britain, it is fair to assume that a sizeable proportion of them use glitter. Glitter looks lovely, doesn’t it, but not lovely enough to allow it to wreck the environment.
Hopefully, this sort of story, running at the same time as the BBC’s epic Blue Planet 2, will change minds and opinions. There is a tendency to turn away from the horrible reality of what the human race is doing to our world. Climate change? Yes, we know that there is no scientific debate about how we are helping to change the world’s climate and not in a good way. We know that we are helping to heat the planet. We know we are poisoning the oceans. But it’s all right: we’ll be dead by the time the real problems begin. True, but our children and grandchildren won’t be.
We compost and recycle as much as we possibly can but I am still concerned about how much rubbish we produce that ends up in landfill. We both drive cars out of necessity but I am concerned about how we are warming the climate. We are taking small steps to save the planet and I will start by stopping the use of glitter. Anyway, there are companies which produce biodegradable glitter and we should encourage them. Little things, I know, but vital all the same.
