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? Banning plastic bags-does it make a difference?
Posted on June 11, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting RegulationsBanning plastic bags-does it make a difference?.
The issue is that the vast majority of plastic bags—except for the paint, the coatings that are on them for the branding—will not biodegrade. These are polyethylene bags for the most part. Polyethylene is basically a solid form of oil—it’s made from the by-products of oil refineries. The process takes small ethylene molecules, which are two-carbon chains, and links them together into a big long chain. So you have these long chains of carbon atoms that basically are chemically inert, with the exception of under extreme conditions—they are flammable. They’re not going to age well. There are no bugs that will consume plastic. They’re going to be around a long, long time. That’s the problem.
The other side of that question, as I understand it at least, is simply the sheer numbers. Five hundred billion bags are used worldwide each year. Ontarians use 7 million plastic bags a day.
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