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? Newfoundland and Labrador’s MMSB to launch composting program in Grand Bank
Posted on March 2, 2012 by DrRossH in BioPlasticsSolid Waste & Recycling Magazine.
This sounds like an interesting trial, but I wonder why they are not taking ‘compostable plastics’? There is much touted about bioplastics or otherwise called compostable plastics saying they can be discarded to compost facilities and become biodegraded away. So why wouldn’t this trial include biodegradable plastics? Perhaps the answer is the consumers can’t readily tell which plastics are compostable and which are not. Compostable plastics have the recycle number 7 on then along with all the other plastics that do not fit the first 6 grades. This makes it impossible to tell compostable plastics apart. Makes you wonder the value in making compostable plastics as yet if there is no way to sort them or dispose of them.
Or it could be that the compost facilities do not want compostable plastics as the do not compost like promoted? This appears to be somewhat common too.
Onumoh says:
Post Author April 4, 2012 at 10:48 pmGreat post. We definitely need to bring more aesnwreas to the problems with plastic and the Great Pacific Garbage patch. I am not sure I would say that green plastics are where we should focus our energy on though. Most of the compostable plastics can’t break down in most backyard compost and the amount of corn, soy, or sugar to manufacture them only takes away from land to grow food. Perhaps it try avoiding plastic altogether. Something I am still working on myself.
Ebi says:
Post Author April 7, 2012 at 6:20 amReview by J. CALDERA for Rating: There is another bag otipon I was looking into before buying this product [ I do not remember the exact name, but it’s a 750-count blue bags ]. That one costs $23 for 750, which comes out to about 3.1 cents per bag. Where are this is $6 per 200, which is exactly 3 cents per bag. (Having the amazon prime trial, I didn’t have to pay shipping, which was nice.)Anyway, doing some more unnecessary research, I learned about ASTM-D6954-04-Oxo-Biodegradable and how those blue bags, and others like it are not really biodegradable, but merely degradable, or that they slowly breaks apart into smaller pieces. This bag is truly biodegradable, as evidenced by the fact that it has an actual expiration. Not sure if anyone cares about that fact, but the fact that it is ultimately cheaper [ which I hope doesn’t change in the future ], the environmental-friendly aspect of it is quite a nice bonus.As per the product itself, it work. Very strong, and it does what it’s supposed to. Not sure what else to ask for of [pseudo]-plastic bags. The bags are the size of adult person’s hands, smaller than I am used to [grocery store bags] but it doesn’t seem to be a problem. I guess it’s size even reduces it’s environmental impact slightly, which is good.I bought two packs, which should last me a year, and if the price doesn’t go up too much, I’ll definitely buy them again.Couple of issues:1) I’ve scoured the bag for a Use By date, and cannot find it. Hopefully, my batch was produced within this year.2) No idea why a 200 count bag would be also be called 90-day supply. If i used 2 of these a day, that would be 100-days.3) I wish they rolled them up the same way the bags-on-board did so I can put them in those little container. But I guess these are a little more fragile than those bags, maybe it’s best to just bring one a a time.
DrRossH says:
Post Author April 9, 2012 at 12:06 amIf the bag has an expiration date it will be an oxodegradable bag. Other types of biodegradable bags do not have expiration dates as they are naturally broken down by microorganisms in landfills or compost piles. The fact that it has an expiration date shows it is a chemical reaction with the clock ticking on it, which shows it is an oxodegradable bag. ASTM 6954 is a test procedure on how to go about testing an oxodegradable plastic. It is not a test in itself. Some oxo manufacturers have invented a word oxobiodegradable in an effort to make their product sound more appealing. But there is no published data that we have read that shows biodegradation actually does occur when tested by an ASTM type method.
So sorry it seems you have been caught out by yet another example of ‘green washing’ by overzealous salespeople caring more about their pocket book than the environment.