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? A New Way To Make Plastic
Posted on September 11, 2015 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsIn wastewater treatment plants in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark, something unusual has been, and continues to happen. Anoxkaldnes, a subsidiary of Veolia, is running pilot prototyping for the production and recovery of Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) – an intermediate material used to produce bioplastics.
Simultaneously, there is also growing support for international action to reduce CO2 emissions ahead of the COP21 summit in Paris in November. The manufacturing of plastics is a CO2 emitting process with estimates ranging from 100 million to 500 million in terms of tonnes per year emitted from production processes in the U.S. alone. That means that the CO2 in plastics production could be equal to as much as 45% of the total annual emissions from motor vehicles in the U.S. If fees or the pricing structure of carbon is changed, then the impacts will be felt by producers of raw petro-based plastics.
Looking through the lens of a circular economy, it is clear that the system of petro-based plastics is not operating effectively in terms of its negative effects and its over-reliance upon finite resources. It’s a system that is facing increasing challenges with limitations that are gradually being acknowledged.
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