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? The case for expanding Container Deposit Schemes – Australia
Posted on January 11, 2022 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting RegulationsSource: The case for expanding Container Deposit Schemes – Inside Waste
Kerbside recycling schemes commenced in the late 1980s and early 1990s in response to increasing environmental awareness under the mantra ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’. The community was looking for a practical hands-on solution to stem the tide of a proliferation of packaging and wasted resources.
We know that glass is a challenge in kerbside collections, producing a low-quality, contaminated product. It is also one of the most popular containers redeemed in a CDS, producing a quality feedstock for infinite glass recycling and remanufacture. Our data from NSW kerbside pre- and post-CDS introduction reveals an average reduction of 60 per cent of eligible containers are diverted from kerbside recycling bins, by count. As glass weighs up to 10 times more than other containers, taking this out of kerbside bins impacts fortnightly recycling bin weights. To have a separate kerbside bin for glass only, and a CDS system in place, seems like overkill.
Unless a deposit scheme is made for all glass containers, then we don’t think it is over kill. A lot of household jars are glass and they do need to be kept separate. Glass are the least littered drink bottle type compared with the plastic and metal.
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