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? It’s raining microplastics in Arctic – Australia
Posted on September 18, 2026 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsSource: It’s raining microplastics in Arctic – Inside Waste
“We found microplastics in every sample analysed,” she said. “We hypothesise that it’s coming from global background contamination, rather than a specific source point.”
Over time, plastic materials can erode into increasingly smaller pieces, allowing them to become transported through the atmosphere. The widespread detection of microplastics suggests that this movement could be contributing to plastic particles being deposited across both urban and remote environments.
However, the study also highlights the limitations of current analysis. Dr Jaeger said the testing could reliably identify particles down to 20 micrometres, but this did not mean microplastics stopped at that size.
“The smaller we go, the more particles we find,” she said. “Below that size, it becomes much more difficult to reliably analyse them, so there is still a lot that we don’t know.”
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