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? Plastics industry seeks trust over sustainability – Europe
Posted on November 11, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsEuropean Plastics News – News.
We would be naive to assume an industry will self police itself when most consequences would result in higher costs and less profit to that industry. Plastics industry or any other. The plastics industry is uniquely bad for this as it produces a very large amount of plastic every year, a lot of which only has a life of just a few minutes but then it takes 100’s of years to go away. That is simply irresponsible manufacturing. If the industry wanted to get a better name, then they have to be active players in the end of life issues of plastic too, not purely focus on the manufacturing side. There is so much that could be done and a lot of it is simple stuff like using easily recycle materials like PE for most of their applications, not to use the less frequent harder to recycle plastics. The list could go on and on and this is basic stuff the industry should have done long ago, not just now start to complain they are getting a bad name. They deserve a bad name at the moment.
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