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? 
Plastic and politics: how bureaucracy is failing our forgotten wildlife
Posted on March 11, 2013 by DrRossH in Plastic & Wildlife
Accumulations of rubbish in the North Pacific Gyre were first noticed 20 years ago. Nicknamed the “Pacific Garbage Patch”, this area now contains up to 40 times more plastic than plankton. But the plastic problem is not limited to the Pacific Garbage Patch. Each day, our oceans are fed more than 20 million new plastic items – or around ~6.4 million tons per year. Wind and waves send this plastic around the globe, so that one country’s garbage washes up in another’s backyard.
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