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? 
Global hunger for plastic packaging leaves waste solution a long way off – The Guardian
Posted on March 12, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste News
Well if we thought we were making progress, don’t get your hopes up that it is much progress. With producers able to manufacture what ever products they like with no responsibility for their actions then we have a long way to go. As stated in the article;
“The idea of producer responsibility is one that people are most agreed on, but no one’s sure how,”
Some simple things that we could do are force packaging manufacturers to use the same type of plastic, for example clear or coloured HDPE. This is a fully recyclable product and if there was a lot of it it would get recycled a lot more. Now with umpteen different plastics being used, some recyclable and some not, it makes no sense and our pathetic attempts to recycle plastic are the result of that.
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