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? Mechanical vs chemical recycling: Call for balance – Australia
Posted on June 20, 2024 by DrRossH in Plastic RecyclingSteve Morriss of Close the Loop Group weighs in on recycled content targets for circular soft plastics and calls for a balanced approach to boost Australia’s recycled content recovery.
Source: Mechanical vs chemical recycling: Call for balance – PKN Packaging News
My research has led to the conclusion that with big business lobbying for chemical recycling, backed by an unnecessary drive for food grade to food grade as the only objective, any targets we might set under these conditions are at risk of failure, again. Chemical recycling is great in theory, and I truly hope it works in practice, both environmentally and economically, but I’m calling for a level playing field for mechanical recycling, which must include incentivising the use of recycled content (RC) from all plastic packaging in non-food, and even non-packaging applications as well.
If we rely on Chemical recycling, we will be waiting a long time and also the carbon foot print will have to be analysed to show that it is a worth while process. But somehow to get to a circular economy, we have to get away from repurposing plastic waste into down cycled items, but get the material back to the big packaging manufacturers to allow them to stop using virgin plastic.
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