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? 
Breaking It Down: The Chemical Recycling/Mass Balance Debate
Posted on July 24, 2024 by DrRossH in Plastic Recycling
Proponents say mass balance negates the need to duplicate billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure to keep recycled and virgin materials separate throughout the value chain, thus enabling scale up. Opponents say making recycled claims on what can’t be physically traced is misleading.
Source: Breaking It Down: The Chemical Recycling/Mass Balance Debate
“There was a bit of a fight in the E.U. among different groups of recyclers. The concern was pyrolysis operators could get credit allocations they should not get for co-products that are not turned into plastics. And mechanical and other recyclers would not have a level playing field,” Bell says.
That is where the debate really heats up: determining which products and co-products get credits.
There are three main methods, from those that assign credits liberally to stricter models.
The most lax is “free allocation.” That’s what chemical companies want, says Simon Hann, managing consultant at Eunomia Research & Consulting.
“This approach allows the freedom to allocate credit to whatever product they want. Then there is “fuel exempt,” which says you can allocate credits to anything except fuels (e.g., petro chemicals that may not go into plastics as well as monomers for plastics get credits), which may be 30 percent of what comes out of the steam cracker. And there is “polymers only,” where you can allocate only to what will go to polymers [primarily ethylene or propylene], which is about another 30 or 40 percent,” Hann says.
The debate lately is centered around whether fuel should count as “recycled material”— at least in the U.S. In Europe, fuel is not under consideration.
“This is where a lot of skepticism around free allocation comes in. Some organizations are calling for mass balance claims to be adjusted to ensure no credits are passed to fuel,” Thompson says.
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