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? Coles, Woolworths recycling scheme collapses after secret stockpiles revealed
Posted on November 8, 2022 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste News
Australia’s largest plastic bag recycling program has collapsed amid revelations hundreds of millions of bags and other soft plastic items dropped off by customers at Coles and Woolworths are being secretly stockpiled in warehouses and not recycled.
Instead of being taken to companies that use the plastic to make other items, REDcycle has been transporting the plastic to warehouses for long-term storage in what some experts consider a potential environmental and fire safety risk.
The Melbourne-based company, which claims to collect up to 5 million plastic items a day from public drop-off points at nearly 2000 supermarkets across the country, did not publicly announce the suspension of the recycling component of its program, and has for months continued collecting large volumes of soft plastics including shopping bags, pet food bags, ice cream wrappers, bubble wrap and frozen food packaging.
The plastics collected are usually sent to other companies, where they are used as ingredients in concrete, asphalt, street furniture, bollards and shopping trolleys.
There are many ways to look at this. Many people are complaining they can’t recycle their plastic waste any more, they feel ‘let down’.
However REDcycle should be congratulated for having down so well for so long. They have been taking our soft plastic for years and absolving us of the guilt from using it in the first place.
The real problem here is we are using too much of this plastic. if people want to really make a difference they should stop buying items wrapped in plastic. They should stop taking plastic bags. This alone would make a big difference. So the people that should feel let down are the ones already not using soft plastic and see that people still have been using it far too much.
Plus, lets not kid ourselves for a moment that taking soft plastic and reusing it in road base is in any way or form called ‘recycling’. Recycling is taking the used material and remaking similar products from it. That stops the use of new virgin material being needed. Putting it in road base, or down cycling to basic products is not stopping the plastic manufactures from making more bags, soft film, packaging supplies etc. That is the problem we need to solve. For plastics this is a very difficult problem and no real scalable solution in the near future.
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