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? Brief – Industry commits to biodegradable packaging – Europe
Posted on June 11, 2012 by DrRossH in BioPlasticsBrief – Industry commits to biodegradable packaging | EurActiv.
This short little brief has a number of hidden issues in it. The main ones being it refers to biodegradable plastics when it should say compostable plastics which really means only those plastics that will biodegrade away in a commercial compost facility. Since there are very few commercial compost facilities around and even less that will accept plastic and there is no special collection for compostable plastics, this consortium well know this agreement they have signed is worth little.
The second issue with the article is that the companies it lists make compostable plastics only so they can say what they like with out having to do change their operations at all except go out and do more marking to sell their products well knowing their products have considerable disposal issues.
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