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? Expanding recycling will require a local approach
Posted on September 29, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsPlastics News – Expanding recycling will require a local approach.
Future increases in recycling materials will come from local and state initiatives, possibly in the form of extended producer responsibility (EPR) initiatives — and not from nationwide endeavors.
And for recycling to grow by leaps and bounds, the different groups involved in recycling will need to cooperate more and look at recycling in a different light.
This is not all the consumers and local groups responsibililty to get this material recycled. The maufacturers of these recyclable plastics need to be made to play a large part too. For example the introduction of a bottle deposit scheme will take recycling from below 20 % to over 80% in just a few months. That is millions and millions of bottle that now go to litter and landfills all of a sudden become recycled. Such a scheme costs the bottle manufcturer very little, costs the consumer who redeems their bottle nothing either. It is win win all the way. But bottle manufacturers fight such schemes therefore they need to be forced into them to make this work.
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