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 plastic?
Posted on March 13, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting RegulationsEco-friendly plastic? | Editorial.
Manufacturers dig deep to find any reason based on any basic appearance of a fact to not get their plastic bags banned. They all try to steer the discussion to the manufacturing side by saying theirs is less costly, more environmentally friendly to make and so on. But what they do not address is the disposal side as they have not one leg to stand on there. There is no good way to dispose of a plastic bag. Recycling is the least worse as the material does go into other bags, but only a percentage per new bag. So every bag recycled requires 3-5 new bags to be made to reuse all its material. This is a runaway model that is highly unsustainable. Yes paper bags use wood, but we farm trees, it is a highly sustainable resource and the sequester a lot of CO2 during their growth. To use a bit more energy and more water to make a paper bag over a plastic bag is well worth it when the environmental problems of plastic bag disposal are considered. And let’s not forget we ought to be getting people to use reusable biodegradable material bags first before a disposable paper bag is to be used. But plastic bags? They are at the bottom of the pile of desirable items. That is the argument that should be put up before any decision committee.
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