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? 
Tasmania to get three new plastic recycling facilities – Australia
Posted on July 5, 2021 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsSource: Tasmania to get three new plastic recycling facilities | Australian Manufacturing Forum
The facilities would reprocess 15,000 tonnes of plastic waste annually and receive a combined $20.3 million in federal support.
Plastics at the three sites would be reprocessed into products including wood plastic composites for home timber decking, fully-recyclable framing for transporting goods, and other products for the aquaculture, agriculture and construction industries.
Good to see but we should be careful about the use of the word recycling here. Some of the above list of products are unlikely to be ever recycled again after their new form. Recycling is generally taken to be used, recycled, used, recycled, again and again, like a metal. But as plastic is a molecular structure, this can’t happen so 1-2 reuses of the material is all that can happen before it needs to be disposed of or made into some chunky block structure that has little in the way of stresses on it so it wont’ fail even if the material quality is inferior now. A better way to describe recycling plastic is “material reuse”.
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