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? 
China’s Plastic Bag Ban Makes Slow Progress
Posted on June 13, 2011 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsThe Chinese government launched a nationwide ban on non-biodegradable ultra-thin (thinner than 0.025 mm) plastic bags and forbade supermarkets and shops from handing out free carriers from June 1, 2008. Thicker and more durable plastic bags are still being made available, but customers should pay for them.
A blogger wrote that a few weeks after the act was implemented, the biggest plastic bag manufacturer went broke, leaving over 20,000 people unemployed. It seems that the social cost of banning plastic bags is huge in China, but what if society as a whole in fact gains more than loses? Let’s see how the ban really works.
Discussion · No Comments
There are no responses to "China’s Plastic Bag Ban Makes Slow Progress". Comments are closed for this post.Oops! Sorry, comments are closed at this time. Please try again later.