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? Dart Container reports progress on polystyrene recycling
Posted on June 3, 2013 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsDart Container reports progress on polystyrene recycling – News – Plastics News#email_sustain.
About 71 million pounds of expanded PS was recycled domestically in 2010, including 37.1 million pounds of post-consumer and post-commercial material, up from 69.4 million total pounds in 2008, according to the Alliance of Foam Packaging Recyclers.
The company collects more than 1.5 million pounds of the material annually, which is recycled and sold to manufacturers that turn it into crown molding, picture frames, agricultural material and other products, said Michael Westerfield, corporate director of recycling programs for Dart, in a phone interview.
The company is to be applauded for making recycling of a difficult product possible. However 1.5 million out of 71 million pounds produced still means a an awful lot of this problem product is still going to landfills and litter. The bigger issue is that we just don’t need much of this product anymore for food purposes. It can easily be replaced with cardboard. Foam cups are not used by most places these days except for a few die hards with their heads in the sand. Clam shell food packaging should be a thing of the past. On a recent trip to a small town in Louisiana, a fast food outlet was handing out all their food in foam clam shell containers. Their restuarant backed right on to the bayou. A look into the bayou showed it was heavily littered with polystyrene cups, and containers. Not only from this facility but many others in the town too. Do they not get it?
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