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? 
Drowning in Plastic: The Impact of Single-Use Plastic
Posted on June 11, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste News
The ubiquitous plastic bag
Drowning in Plastic: The Impact of Single-Use Plastic – Independent Voter Network.
So how many plastic bags do we actually use?
A common estimate for the number of plastic bags consumed each year is 500 billion, although many environmentalist organizations claim that the number is closer to 1 trillion. These estimates would require 60 to 100 million barrels of oil per year to produce.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the United States goes through roughly 100 billion plastic grocery bags every year.
Once in the ocean or landfills a plastic bag will take 400 to 1,000 years to degrade, and no more than 5% of the bags are ever recycled.
Many of the plastic bags used end up in the ocean, as the second most common ocean refuse after cigarette butts. It has been estimated that every square mile of ocean has approximately 46,000 pieces of plastic floating in it. According to the United Nations, 10% of the plastic produced every year worldwide will end up in the ocean.
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