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? Companies who care… by law –
Posted on August 11, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsCompanies who care… by law – Features – ABC Environment (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).
If you go take a walk along a park path or a beach or around a public transport station you will see so many empty plastic bottles just careless littered. Every year it gets worse. Why? The public perceive them to have no value and that is the big mistake business have duped the government into doing nothing about this situation. You can see a person walk up to a rubbish bin with a recycle bin right beside it and throw a bottle (glass or plastic) into the trash. Our current waste education has taught people to not care. The bottle manufacturers love this. It absolves them of any responsibility for the products they produce well knowing many will end up as litter and many more still will go to landfill at the taxpayers’ expense. A container deposit scheme will fix this in very short time. We’ll go from about 25% of plastic bottles being recycled to about 80%. Imagine saving all those resources from going to landfill. That has to be good for the economy and the jobs it will create.
(An aside note, the Packaging covenant like to tout this 61% total packaging recycling as being good enough but this is hiding a lot of important data. This includes all the cardboard containers that are mostly at home recycling which are recycled by the council kerbside program at the ratepayers expense. Noting to do with the Covenant at all. If you look at the away from home containers like drink bottles for example the recycling rate is abysmally low. This is what the packaging Covenant are responsible for, namely very little progress on a very important issue. Any self governing Stewardship program is destined to fail before it starts, that has been proven over and over again, it is just sad to think people charged with regulating these important issues still believe these schemes will work. Self regulating stewardship is a another name for les delay any progress for as many more years we can get away with. If Aug 24 brings no CDS program into practice then in 5 years time we will be back at the same position wondering how to control even more litter and resources lost to landfills.)
A CDS does not cost the bottle manufacturers one dime, as they pass the 10 cents on to the consumer. Anyone who believes that this will put pressure on the cost of living is digging deep for feeble excuses. Those low income people will be redeeming all their cartons and have no net cost. There will be ample low income people and kids who go searching for discarded containers to earn a few extra dollars and that will help them a lot. Those wealthy enough to not care are making their own choice and their unredeemed deposit will go to finding the scheme and paying employee wages. Do we think anyone is going to notice the difference between a can of coke costing $2.50 and $2.60?
Australia has a very bad problem of littered drink bottles and resource loss to landfills that it is time to bring in Extended Producer Responsibility and make those (the manufacturers) partially responsible for the mess their products are making, and pay part of the cost to help bring back our precious environment perception we used to have.
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