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? Ald. Moreno, Environmental Advocates Call For Plastic Bag Ban At Committee Hearing -Illinois
Posted on June 19, 2013 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting RegulationsThe average Chicagoan uses 500 plastic bags a year, Moreno said. The “monster” (pictured) represents those bags. About 3.7 million plastic bags are used every day in the city of Chicago, Moreno added.
Jared Teutsch, water policy advocate at the Alliance for the Great Lakes, said in 2012, its beach cleanup volunteers removed more than 5,800 plastic bags from Chicago’s beaches.
The bags not only cause environmental harm, they can also become lodged in sewer grates or tangled in manufacturing machinery, causing economic damage for government and businesses, said Kathryn Abendroth, field coordinator with Environment Illinois.
It is good to see that finally some one with some sense is paying attention. We all know that plastic bag recycling does not work on even a small scale. The bags are just to low of a value for anyone to make an effort to do anything with. Yes those recycle bins are sitting in a corner somewhere gathering dust, we’ve all seen them.
Banning them is the best, but making non plastic reusable ones available at low cost is a good support to the idea. Gives people who fight change less to complain about.
It should be noted that if a plastic bag costs 3 cents then a biodegradable bags costs 3.3 cents. It is a 10% factor. But a ban is still far better than making them biodegradable.
For industry to come out and say recycling is the best alternative is only supporting the plastic bags makers at the expense to all the rest of us. They know it doesn’t work but are trying to stall the process as long as possible. This is wrong.
Ban the bags and lets keep the environment for all the others that follow.
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