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? Oregon PET recycling plant has new name, set to open
Posted on April 28, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsPlastics News – Oregon PET recycling plant has new name, set to open.
We applaud this plant for getting into operation. It should not be the tax payers that are providing all the funds to get this going however. It should be the bottle making industry subsidising recycling companies like the above to collect and recycle the plastic waste the bottle companies are partially responsible for. Why do the industry bottling companies get let off scott-free on this? Why are they allowed to produce products that have a very short one-off life, use valuable resources, and yet get littered or dumped to a landfill to be lost forever? That is irresponsible to allow this to happen. Surely our economy would be better off if these bottle manufacturers pitched in to help get their discarded products back to be recycled. It is called Extended Producer Responsibility. Schemes like a container deposit scheme would go a long way to getting recycling up to 80% or more and we’d all be better off.
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