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? 
‘Throwaway Living’: When Tossing Out Everything Was All the Rage
Posted on April 27, 2018 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste News
In the mid-1950s, the notion of using something once and then throwing it away wasn’t seen as wasteful; it was considered the height of modern living.
Source: ‘Throwaway Living’: When Tossing Out Everything Was All the Rage
In August 1955, LIFE magazine published an article with the now-vaguely-sinister, then-celebratory title, “Throwaway Living.” The idea, it seems, was that humans had entered a kind of wanton Golden Age, when cleaning up after ourselves was just one more quaint waste of time, and tossing more and more of our used-once items into the trash was another sign of modernity’s relentless ascendancy over the drudgery of the past.
What have we done! The plastics and petroleum industry had a field day back then, now we are all paying for it.
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