Glitter is on my mind today. It’s also on the floor, clothes, Christmas ornaments… in fact it’s taking over the planet. Seriously. The stuff is everywhere and each day more and more of it is pumped into decorations, tee-shirts, and greeting cards. It’s all over the Christmas village Heather setup the other day and now I see shiny sparkles on the floor.
Normally I don’t worry much about small specs on the floor (unless they’re moving, things moving by themselves on the floor get my attention) — I can ignore dirt as well as any man, but in my house I’m in charge of vacuuming the floors. Two, three times a month I run the vacuum over most of the floors in our home. I don’t move furniture and sometimes skip the guest room if we haven’t had guests, but otherwise, I turn my well trained eye to the task of getting all the specs of dirt off the floor.
When I’m not vacuuming, I do start building a mental map of where there is non-moving dirt I need to vacuum up. Of course, there are times when what I think is a bit of dirt is really a stain or part of the pattern on the carpet so I do check those areas slightly more carefully. I know that there is a black dot by the back door that is not dirt, but rather a small chip in the kitchen title that has resisted all my attempts to vacuum it up.
Just to clarify here — moving dirt is an indication of bugs (ants, spiders, fleas). Knowing Heather’s reaction to seeing something like that, I’ve trained myself to react to those right away. I don’t need that level of screaming in my life.
So why does glitter on the floor bother me? You can’t just vacuum it up. Oh sure, the vacuum sucks into its dirt chamber but then go empty that into the trash and you’ll just see glitter bits flying off into the wind and on to your shirt, pants and shoes. Then as surely as God created spiders for the cats to chase, glitter will get tracked right back onto my mostly clean floors.
Here’s a few facts about glitter: It’s mostly plastic with some aluminum and a mix of toxic chemicals to make it sparkly. It doesn’t biodegrade and likely will outlast humanity on this planet. Some 20 million pounds of the stuff is manufactured every year (well that is one source, another source said 100 million pounds, but either way, its a lot). Glitter has been made for centuries, but it wasn’t until sometime around the 1930s that we started making out of plastic. It won’t be that much longer and the dirt in our yards will have a detectable amount of glitter in it (if we haven’t already gotten there that is).
Here’s a scary thing I learned, forensic scientists have cataloged somewhere around 1,000 different kinds of glitter. They can now identify that a criminal has been in my kitchen by comparing the kinds of glitter on their shoes to the kind of glitter on my floor. Since glitter is virtually impossible to get rid of I expect that banks will soon stop putting dye packs in the bags of cash they give to robbers and will start putting glitter bombs in there instead.
Well the only good news is that I guess I could stop referring to glitter on my floor as trash, but rather as part of my home security system.
