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? Biodegradable or Bioassimulated definitions for Plastics
Posted on October 17, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsThe FTC’s recent guidelines on labelling biodegradable plastics make sense I doubt anyone would say otherwise. They are trying to stop manufacturers from greenwashing of their product labels to prevent misleading the consumer on how green their products are. So how do we describe a plastic that will biodegrade in a landfill over many years. (5,10 or even 20 years)? The FTC say it cannot be labelled biodegradable without substantiation. What is substantiation? Proof of 100% biodegraded in a certain time fame, in every conceivable landfill condition? It is not feasible to do this by anyone.
Why not coin a new term ‘Bioassimulated’ to represent the situation where biodegradation will occur over longer time periods. e.g. This plastic bag will be bioassimulated back into the environment when discarded to a landfill.
If the word Biodegradable has certain implied meanings to the average consumer i.e. fully degrade in 12 months, then when they read Bioassimulated it will not have an implied association but would still inform the consumer that a biological breakdown will happen on that product.
When we say a plastic item will biodegrade in multiple years that is really only an educated guess based on some short term reputable tests that show a partial biodegradation within that test time frame. People can’t run 5 or 10 year biodegradation tests in every landfill condition. Yet if we know from these shorter term tests that reasonable fractions of the plastic have biodegraded away then we would expect that process to continue (at non liner rates, at different rates and for different landfills and different plastic parent materials) over time till all the plastic has been biodegraded away. Therefore, based on these tests (Like D5511) we ought to be able to verbally extrapolate to say this plastic will be ‘Bioassimulated’. It has no inferred time frame in it, is easy to prove (test results) why we say that and it informs the consumer the plastic has some special biological breakdown properties.
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