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? Comment on the Bioplastic PLA
Posted on February 3, 2012 by DrRossH in BioPlasticsThis comment was posted on the Linked-In Biodegradability group.
Please review the amount of petroleum PLA uses in its entire life cycle and you will see it uses more than normal plastics. The increased use of corn for plastics and ethanol has help increase the size of the “Dead Zone” in the Gulf of Mexico because of the fertilizers. It is an area that nothing can live. It is about the size of New Jersey and is growing. My research also shows that about 30-40% of all corn ends up as plastic or ethanol thus increasing the cost of food, meat, eggs, etc. I am morally against a product that can cause people to go hungry. Especially when one examines the number of locations that can compost PLA . In the US there are about 98 such locations where PLA will properly degrade. And even those are decreasing as studies have shown that PLA does not break down in all commercial and municipal composts unless it is ground up first, which most composters do not want to do. So it ends up in landfills where it lasts as long as a normal plastic.
Leslie Harty says:
Post Author March 13, 2012 at 9:21 pmBravo !! When WalMart first came out with PLA containers, NatureWorks was bragging on reducing the use of petroleum in making this and the carbon footprint. A lttle astrik let me to the bottom of the article where it said this statement was based on buying energy credits.
No one has addressed the increase in food costs- corn has gone up 78% in the last 3 years. A large pork raiser in the US had to go into Chaper 11 , not because of the economy, but because of the higher cost of feed.
Dannubia says:
Post Author April 3, 2012 at 4:11 pmHi Gwyn 🙂 There are compostible bags out there ilicsfecaply designed for your compost kitchen bucket – you take the scraps, bag and all out to your compost bin or worm farm. So yes, provided the bags are fully compostible like the cornstarch bags I provided the link to at Biome (and they are available elsewhere), they can go in the worm farm! I can definitely relate to your pyrex investments too 🙂 Since I’ve been cooking from scratch and trying to conserve energy by cooking more than one dish at a time in the oven, I have needed to expand my freezerware by about ten-fold, LOL. And yep, although the lids are plastic, with care, they should last a long time.
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