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? American Progressive Bag Alliance Urges Illinois General Assembly To Pass Statewide Recycling Bill
Posted on May 6, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting RegulationsLooking at some numbers in this letter the APBA wrote to the legislators to convince them this was a good law to pass. They said bags recycling has increased 24%. While that sounds good, let’s look at the total. About 2% of bags are recycled in the US. So 24% of that makes 2.5% of bags get recycled. That is still ridiculously low. Again what they are saying is if bag consumption actually reduced, people would get laid off and they could not find any other work. This is just politics as there would be many more jobs made in the reusable bag industry for starters.
It is neigh impossible to put a recycling bin at every grocery store in the state and arrange for it’s collection with no cost outlay to do it. The APBA know this, so they say they’ll put recycling bins at major shopping centers only. The immediate consequence of that is they have limited the number of bags that can get recycled.
Who is going to pay the for the large cost education program to get consumers to change their mind about using their grocery store bag as a bin liner or a doggy poop bag and then throw it into the trash like they do now. These bags are not and never will be recycled, but just cause problems in the landfill as they do not biodegrade.
Over all such a bill will do little to change the current problem and if passed the a different set of legislators will be having the same discussion in 10 years time, when Illinois will now be 10 years behind the times on sustainability issues like this plastic bag one and their state’s environment will have 10 years of more pollution. The bag manufacturers will be the only ones smiling with their profits.
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