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? Petition for New Zealand to ban plastic waste exports to developing countries; slated as ‘waste colonialism’
Posted on June 9, 2023 by DrRossH in GeneralNZ exported over 300 million kg of plastic waste since 2014, mostly to developing nations.
New Zealand remains one of the most wasteful countries in the developed world – and it’s been estimated the average Kiwi household churns through nearly 1000 plastic containers and bottles every year.
Ministry for the Environment director of waste and resource efficiency Glenn Wigley said New Zealand did not currently have facilities to recycle most plastics here.
If New Zealand stopped exporting plastic waste it would simply go to landfill, he said.
“We’ve gone through decades of underinvestment. It’s been estimated at a $2 billion shortfall.
“So we currently don’t have the right infrastructure within New Zealand to be able to deal with plastic wastes entirely.”
This is a bad state for New Zealand to be in. No one can keep hiding the problem. It is longer than 3 year election terms, but it has to be dealt with in a sounds engineered way.
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