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? How to pitch green bloggers | GreenBiz.com
Posted on June 7, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsHow to pitch green bloggers | GreenBiz.com#comment-23558#comment-23558#comment-23558#comment-23558.
For our 5 cents worth, it is on the packaging. Plastic in particular.
Some one above said don’t just say biodegradable. It is a magnificent concept and a disposal mechanism of almost everything up till about 1960 when plastics started to take off. So now the general term biodegradable is really made up of three main and quite different disposal technologies.
1) Landfill biodegradable. As it sounds plastics with a landfill-biodegradable additive in them will anaerobically biodegrade over a number of years into methane and humus. Modern landfills now capture methane to generate electricity.
2) Compostable, this is fast aerobic biodegradation in special commercial compost facilities. This is not your backyard composter as the do not generate enough heat. They produce CO2 hence there is no chance to get the stored energy of the plastic waste. So if you get a compostable bag and want to drive ½ way across the state to drop it off at a commercial compost facility then you can be assure it will biodegrade away.
3) The last one receives a lot of PR but it is mostly a con. Degradable plastics are made by putting an additive in them that starts a slow chemical reaction (not biological) that causes the plastic to fragment into little pieces over a couple of years. It only works on plastics up on top of the ground not in landfills as it needs oxygen to work. There are so many criticisms of degradable plastics as causing a worse environmental problem. But they have good salesman it seems that lead people on to think degradable is really biodegradable and it works in a landfill too.
So to be correct whenever a manufacturer says their product or packaging is biodegradable they ought to say biodegradable where and tell the consumer how to dispose of it. Not that that would really help too much either. If you don’t have a commercial compost facility at you street end where are you going to put you compostable plastic waste? In the trash more than likely as compostable plastics cannot be recycled. If you have a degradable plastic, how would you dispose of that? Again trash is the only answer, as they too cannot be mainstream recycled as they would contaminate other products with the degradable additive. Only landfill-biodegradable plastics (which can be recycled mainstream) seem to make sense as the too will go to trash if not recycled. Then once in a landfill they will start to biodegrade away.
Kawu says:
Post Author June 22, 2012 at 6:24 pmI like putting this bag in my copsomt pail because I can tie it off,drop it in the copsomting pile avoiding a lot of mess. The product reivew says it doesn’t leak, however it does leak if it sits too many days waiting to be filled with copsomt materials. Even though it leaks I still like it, I just put a couple of paper towles at the bottom of my pail. The bag does seem to keep the stink down which is nice!