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? Missed targets, hard truths from APCO’s CEO – Australia
Posted on March 5, 2026 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting RegulationsAPCO CEO Chris Foley has delivered a candid message to members: Australia’s packaging targets were missed, the system settings are flawed, and reform needs to embrace practical, enforceable change.
Source: Missed targets, hard truths from APCO’s CEO – PKN Packaging News
Missed targets, hard truths
Foley was equally direct about the [2025] National Packaging Targets.
“We should be honest about this. The National Packaging Targets were not achieved.”
However, he argued the targets should remain as a benchmark – not a blame exercise. “The question is not who didn’t do enough. The question is which system levers make these outcomes impossible, or unnecessarily hard, to achieve at scale.”
He identified four persistent barriers: economics, inconsistent definitions and enforcement across jurisdictions, insufficient recovery capability, and consumer confusion caused by misaligned labelling and recovery pathways.
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