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? Maine school district drops PS lunch trays
Posted on August 11, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsPlastics News – Maine school district drops PS lunch trays.
The two commenter’s are missing the point about plastic waste. With plastic there are two issues, it’d production and its disposal. Too many people get suckered into the production side of plastic being told it is uses less energy and water, and no trees than the cardboard or paper alternative. However trees are farmed and are a renewable resource. The more trees we plant the more carbon we remove from the air. Water is recyclable, it can’t be destroyed. So it can be used over and over again so using more water in a process is not an argument, it is only one put up by the plastics industry to try to protect their sales. On Energy, energy from renewable resources has very little impact on the environment compared to coal energy, so as soon as we can transition to renewable energy, the energy argument has no merit either. What does that leave us? Look at the disposal side. Plastic items do not biodegrade, they will be there for 100’s of years. Using a plastic box for a 30 min lunch then throwing it away to remain in a landfill for 1000 years makes no sense in any ones mind. That is a plastic waste accumulation nightmare. Every day the waste pile grows a little more. A cardboard container will biodegrade way in a few years and return to the earth. That is how the future will be run. We applaud the school district for having this foresight.
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