July 2021 - Plastic Waste Solutions
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Amcor brings compostable flexibles to ANZ – Australia
Posted on July 29, 2021 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsSource article Performing like conventional plastic, the compostable films and laminates can be disposed of using existing composting infrastructure, decomposing back into soil like organic waste, and are all certified either ‘home compostable’ and ‘compostable’ according to industry-wide standards. This...
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Can film be recycled into good quality pellets? – Australia
Posted on July 27, 2021 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsSource: Can film be recycled into good quality pellets? - Inside Waste Ambigroup Reciclagem S.A. is a recycler of agricultural film, used agricultural irrigation tubing and other post-consumer waste in Portugal. The input materials are naturally very moist and contaminated...
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Why is workplace recycling so hard to get right? – Australia
Posted on July 27, 2021 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsSource Article In Australia, every year over 20 million tonnes of waste goes to landfill from the commercial and industrial sector according to the National Waste Report 2020. The report also shows that while recycling rates are increasing so is...
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Pact and Cleanaway to recycle food grade plastics – Australia
Posted on July 26, 2021 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsSource: Pact and Cleanaway to recycle food grade plastics | Australian Manufacturing Forum Packaging group Pact Group and waste processing company Cleanaway today announced they would build Australia’s largest post-consumer polyethylene recycling plant converting locally collected kerbside materials into high...
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USyd develops soft plastics recycling robot – Australia
Posted on July 23, 2021 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsSource In what is hoped to be a revolutionary step for streamlining the recycling process of soft plastics, engineering researchers from the University of Sydney have developed a new robot that identifies and sorts the problematic waste materials.
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Ourdoor Balloon Relese Banned in Victoria – Australia
Posted on July 20, 2021 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting RegulationsOriginal Article This month Victoria's new Environmental Protection Act comes into effect. As part of this, deliberately releasing balloons into the environment...
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Satellites Can Spy on Microplastics, Researchers Show
Posted on July 14, 2021 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsSource: Satellites Can Spy on Microplastics, Researchers Show We’d been taking these radar measurements of surface roughness and using them to measure wind speed, and we knew that the presence of stuff in the water alters its responsiveness to the...
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AFGC supports government on plastics ban – Australia
Posted on July 9, 2021 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting RegulationsSource: AFGC supports government on plastics ban - Inside Waste The two phases of the Waste Plastics Export ban, supported with Government funding from the $600 million Recycling Modernisation Fund invested in the recycling sector, should increase the quality of...
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The future of waste infrastructure – Australia
Posted on July 9, 2021 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsSource: The future of waste infrastructure - Inside Waste A study undertaken by the Wealth from Waste Cluster identified the following barriers to a circular economy; high cost of collection, complex product design, preferences for new products and immature secondary...
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Woolworths Launches Preferred Packaging Materials List – Australia
Posted on July 8, 2021 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting RegulationsContinue reading this entry →

How many people today grab a takeaway coffee cup from the local cafe to drink on the go? We don’t know, but the number must be enormous.. Most every one of the above have a plastic top that will last 100s of years. Some cafes still use plastic cups that last a similar time. Is 10 minutes of coffee worth 100s of years of trash?
These items can be seen littering our gutters and on our streets all over the place. If they were all cardboard, they would still be littered, but they would, at least, be gone in a short time.
They do not need to be made of plastic.
On the way home from the gym last week, a distance of about 1 km (1/2 mile), I counted the items of plastic litter on the curb as I walked. In that short distance I counted 63 pieces of plastic litter. Plastic drink bottles, bottle tops, candy wrappers, plastic film, polystyrene fragments etc. That seemed to be a lot to me. I guess it is a generational thing. Our parents would have been horrified to see that amount, whereas it seems to go unnoticed by our youth of today. In another 20 years how many pieces will there be on this stretch, -- 200? What will today’s youth think of that new amount then when they are older? Will their children be so readily accepting of a higher amount of litter?