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 challenges include container lightweighting, bale contamination
Posted on November 10, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsPlastics News – Recycling challenges include container lightweighting, bale contamination.
‘Light-weighting of bottles is more sustainable’ raises some questions.
Why is it more sustainable? One could argue that less plastic loose in the environment is better for the environment, true. Or that less plastic used by manufacturers is beneficial for the environment, true again. But sustainable? Sustainable refers to using resources at a rate where they can be naturally replaced with in the life time of that product.
Making plastic bottles is not sustainable by any definition. The wrong word has been used by manufacturers to justify their actions to make it sound good to consumers.
A plastic bottle loose in the environment is still the same visual pollution no matter if it is a thin wall or a thick wall bottle.
Do we care that a thin bottle takes 200 years to break down vs 300 years for a thick wall bottle (numbers are just examples)? No, they are both equally unacceptable.
In reality the only people who benefit from light-weighting bottles is the manufacturers as they use less raw materials. The rest of us suffer as we did before.
Let us call it what it is not what the manufacturers try to sell themselves as.
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