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? More stockpiles of soft plastics from failed REDcycle recycling scheme uncovered – Australia
Posted on April 11, 2023 by DrRossH in Plastic Recycling
New stockpiles of soft plastics from the failed REDcycle recycling scheme have been uncovered as the work to develop an alternative program continues.
The program was wound up in November 2022 after it emerged that plastics consumers had returned to supermarkets to be recycled were instead put into storage.
Nineteen storage sites have been located in NSW, 15 in Victoria, six in South Australia, two in Tasmania, one in Queensland and one in Western Australia.
The REDcycle scheme was the only way most Australians could easily recycle their soft plastics.
Coles and Woolworths gained control of the stockpiles in late February and have formed a taskforce with Aldi to try to develop a new national scheme.
The supermarket giants have warned that setting up a new national scheme could be a slow process and are looking into shipping waste overseas to free up limited domestic recycling capacity.
But there was a shortage of local capacity to process the plastics, and an expansion beyond pilot projects in a limited number of areas could take until 2024 or 2025.
The indicators continually point to a lack of ability to handle recycled soft plastic in Australia and we are going to have a problem manage this problem for many years. Reduce as the main focus or WTE of landfill-biodegradable as a smaller secondary focus seem to be the only options
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