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? Eco-friendly packaging could be poisoning our compost – USA
Posted on September 10, 2019 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsPer-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are everywhere. PFAS are useful, but the major problem with many of them is that they never fully breakdown in the environment—and some have been found to pose serious health risks. That’s why staff at Zero Waste Washington, a nonprofit advocating to reduce waste, were concerned about compostable food packaging, because the paper-based boxes, cups, and plates are lined with—you guessed it—a coating that often contains PFAS.
Source: Eco-friendly packaging could be poisoning our compost
Heather Trim from Zero Waste Washington called me and said we push everything to be composted that can be composted … but I think we’ve made a big mistake, we didn’t know about these perfluorinated compounds,” recalls Linda Lee, an agronomist at Purdue University. Lee proposed a study to investigate whether these chemicals were making their way into the compost.
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