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? Bioplastics Get Trashed in Rhode Island
Posted on June 11, 2012 by DrRossH in BioPlasticsBioplastics Get Trashed in Rhode Island – Front Page Journal –.
The folks in Rhode Island have come to this unfortunate reality realisation that the green promises of Bioplastics can not deliver benefits for their plastic waste management processes. While heavily oversold by manufacturers that bioplastics are biodegradable and made from plants making all our concerns abut plastics go away, the exact opposite is true at the moment. For bioplastics to be biodegradable, they require special composting infrastructure and unless that is made available, the bioplastic is not biodegradable.
Being made from plants and not petroleum sounds green, but when studies are done to measure how much fuel is used to plant, grow and harvest a crop there doesn’t seem to be any benefit. And do we want to take up valuable arable land that can grow food to make a plastic bottle that has a usable life of a few minutes then a polluting life of 100’s of years?
“Though the raw materials for plant-based PET and HDPE come from renewable, lower-carbon sources, the resulting plastics are chemically identical to traditional plastic bottles. And, as plastic, the plant-based bottles carry all the same environmental impacts as those made from fossil fuels, and they don’t biodegrade.
So, are they better for the environment? That is a complicated question and one that depends on how the plants used to make the plastic are grown: Are they grown with petrochemicals? Are they produced from GMOs? And so much depends on the afterlife of the bottle — in Rhode Island plant-based PET (and HDPE) bottles go in the trash.”
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