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? Recycling boost for UK economy
Posted on November 24, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsKey to all this recycling working is the getting back of the waste packaging, back to a central facility where it then becomes economic to transport it en masse back to a reprocessing centre. The most logical way to do this is to have the people responsible for making this plastic waste, have some responsibility in getting it back. A container deposit scheme for bottles and containers is such an idea that works very well to increase recycling rates about 300% with no cost to the manufacturers and no cost to the consumers except for those that choose not to get their deposit back.
Once packaging is at the consumer level it is spread thinly far and wide and any commercial attempt to recover it will never be viable. However putting a refundable deposit on an item means the public will do all this collection for free as they get their deposit back. This is a win-win situation for the public with a cleaner environment, jobs created and less imported virgin materials into the country. It is also a win-win for the manufacturers and most importantly for the environment.
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