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? 
Commission aims to slash plastic bag use – Europe
Posted on June 11, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting Regulations
Commission aims to slash plastic bag use | EurActiv.
The Commission called for suggestions on Wednesday (18 May) on how to deal with the billions of bags used in the European Union each year, but which take hundreds of years to decompose.
“Fifty years ago, the single-use plastic bag was almost unheard of. Now we use them for a few minutes and they pollute our environment for decades,” EU Environment Commissioner Janez Potocnik said in a statement on Wednesday.
Each person in the 27-country European Union uses on average 500 plastic carrier bags per year – most of them just once.
A total of 3.4 million tonnes of plastic bags, weighing the same as about two million cars, were produced in Europe in 2008.
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