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 than 25,000kg of plastic littered in NZ daily – New Zealand
Posted on February 16, 2015 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsMore than 25,000kg of plastic littered in NZ daily – National – NZ Herald News.
New Zealand, one of 192 countries examined, generated about 3.68kg of waste per person each day – a rate much 
higher than the vast amount of nations studied.
Of that, 1,272,006kg was plastic – contributing to 9 per cent of the total waste stream – and in 2010, 9,286 tonnes of plastic waste was considered mismanaged.
By 2025, that amount would rise to 11,517 tonnes.
NZ has performed a great job of promoting it self to the world as a green haven, have not yet destroyed by our over consumptive world.
The practices of the many locals does not support that at all. Their consumption of plastic especially disposable plastic items is appalling. Being a small nation almost every thing is imported hence a lot of cheap plastic items. The Auck council for example makes people buy a big plastic bag to put their rubbish in every week. That has a life of a few hours then goes to the landfill. Every house every week. This is so far behind other countries nowadays. The people need to wake up that they are destroying the very thing that brings a mass of tourism to their door. Once a environment gets polluted with plastic it is very hard and expensive to clean it up, if it can even be cleaned up. The longer the plastic is in the environment, the more it fragments to microplastics and then it is almost impossible to clean up.
Simple initiatives like a drink bottle deposit scheme, a plastic bag ban or a 10 cent fee per bag, banning plastic straws and replacing them with paper straws, not using plastic cups for eat in customers and such will reduce plastic waste by over 50% and the consumers won’t even really know much of a difference.
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