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? Letter: Great minds must create biodegradable plastic bags – The Buffalo News
Posted on April 4, 2016 by DrRossH in GeneralA recent letter writer suggested that the problem with plastic bags could be corrected by creating biodegradable plastic bags. This cannot be a brand-new thought.Certainly all of the businesses in the world who sell us every conceivable type of plastic bag – big, small, handled or s… – The Buffalo News
via Letter: Great minds must create biodegradable plastic bags – The Buffalo News.
This is not a new idea at all and there are quite a few options around on this. Most don’t biodegrade though. many only degrade (fragment into small pieces) which is worse for the environment. many factors in this topic that have to be considered.
1) The ocean. Biodegradable bags need microorganisms to eat them. There are very few bugs in the ocean so biodegradable bags are not a solution to ocean plastic at all.
2) Compostable bags are claimed biodegradable yet will only biodegrade in special commercial compost facilities. In the hands of the consumer who put them in the big to go to landfill they do not biodegrade as there is no oxygen, or enough temperature.
The best solution by far is to just ban disposable bags. We don’t need them at all in spite of what the bag manufacturers say. They want to keep polluting our planet and choking wildlife for their profits. That is wrong.
Ban them and let people use reusable bags. Simple and very effective.
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