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? Coffee makers wrestle with recyclability of single-serve pods – USA
Posted on June 7, 2013 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsCoffee makers wrestle with recyclability of single-serve pods – News – Plastics News.
The question remains whether the convenience of single-serve coffee systems is worth the overall environmental impact.
“The trade-off that we need to consider is, for shaving a few seconds off the amount of time it takes me to make my coffee in the morning, what is it costing in terms of what’s going to the landfill, what kinds of non-renewable source materials like fossil fuel-derived plastics are being used, and what other environmental costs are associated with that.”
The manufacture of a disposable item that is purely designed for a few minutes use and the disposal side of its design ignored it irresponsible manufacturing.
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