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? EU-wide ban on non-biodegradable plastic bags can lower waste
Posted on March 11, 2014 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting RegulationsEU-wide ban on non-biodegradable plastic bags can lower waste: theparliament.com.
In 2010, around 100 billion plastic bags were placed on the EU market, eight billion of these were littered, and only six per cent were recycled.
After many debates and impact assessment studies, the commission has finally put an ‘idea’ for the reduction of lightweight plastic carrier bags in member states on the table.
I said ‘idea’, because it is more a theoretical, cautious suggestion, than a concrete legislative decision. We asked for robust measures to end the floating of 80 million tonnes of plastics in the oceans; we are worried about plastics’ dangerous components entering the food chain and the consequences for human and animal health.
We get, instead, an invitation to member states to ‘dare’ to reduce, through whichever means they deem appropriate, the consumption of lightweight shoppers, thinner than 50 micron, which is 0.05 mm.
What about the other plastic bags, the thicker ones? They can still be consumed and littered? They can still float on our seas for decades? What about the dangerous oxo-degradable plastic bags?
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