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? NY approves bag fee |
Posted on May 13, 2016 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting RegulationsSource: NY approves bag fee |
Hard to believe that educated people like the councillors would make statements like, ”it is a tax’ , or ‘my constituents can’t afford this’. The whole idea of a bag charge it to get people to stop using them and start bring their own reusable bags. Those make your shopping free. Why is that so hard to understand? We have to stop using these bags and stop now. Every city should have bag fees or bag bans in place. And don’t exempt biodegradable bags as most biodegradable bags are ‘not biodegradable’ at the consumer level.
Using a bag a 2nd time before it goes in the trash is not better. The result is we still have all these bags littering and in landfills.
Use paper bags or even better reusable material bags.
As for recycling. This has been greatly mis promoted. A plastic can only be recycled 2-3 times before its molecular structure is so destroyed that it no longer had desirable properties. To make a new bag from recycled bags needs about 60% new material and 30% recycled material. Which means to fully recycle one bag, the equivalent of 2 more new bags need to be made. This is going backwards.
We just need to stop using these disposable bags, life will not end if we don’t have them.
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