Glitter products are everywhere: from party decorations, to cosmetics, to costumes and even boat paint. But glitter is often made of microplastics in the form of flakes, making its small size and dispersibility a troublesome dilemma when it comes to health and environment safety. Not to mention that its cleanup is difficult, if not impossible.
Now, a team of researchers at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada have developed an innovative glitter product that is biodegradable and uses light-reflecting shapes to create sparkles unlike any other – with the potential to mitigate plastic pollution around the world.
“In modern glitter production, aluminium and polyethylene terephthalate (microplastics) are usually combined to produce the final product,” said Amin Babaeighazvini, a PhD student in USask’s College of Engineering, and a lead member of the research team that developed the product. “Although I have developed a number of biodegradable films over the past eight years, we have recently developed biodegradable and edible glitters from natural resources that do not include microplastics.”
To reduce the environmental threats of producing and using glitter, Babaeighazvini and his research supervisor Dr. Bishnu Acharya (PhD), an associate professor of engineering, have created ChiralGlitter, a plant-based product inspired by the natural process of producing structural colours.
“The glitter particles are a variety of unique shapes and sizes that allow them to reflect light at different angles, causing the surface to sparkle or shimmer,” said Babaeighazvini. This means the colours in the glitter come from light reflecting off its surface.
“Most of the colours that we see in nature are either from pigments or structural colours,” said Acharya. “Structural colour is based on how the light falls on the structure. The light reflects in a certain way, and that gives the colour. We mimic these phenomena in creating ChiralGlitter.”
ChiralGlitter is made of cellulose nanoparticles, a substance found in plant cell walls. This makes the product 100% bio-based. Although the concept of biodegradable glitter is not new, the product invented by this USask research team avoids the aluminium and microplastic coatings still used often to create a sparkly surface.
“We use a biomaterial such as wood or agricultural waste to synthesise cellulose nanocrystals,” said Babaeighazvini. “Then, we fabricate functional materials from those nanocrystals, such as these biodegradable and edible glitters. The thing that makes this eco-friendly and non-toxic is the cellulose. Nanocrystals are from nature.”
“In our lab, we always focus on how to get high-value material from something which is underutilized,” said Acharya. “And one of the applications is a bio-glitter. But the goal is always, how can we maximize the value of the underutilized biomass and create a value chain to drive the bioeconomy.”
