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? Time to debunk a sustainable pack myth? – UK
Posted on July 21, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsThis is typical how this industry operates. A new direction or trendy phase is initiated and every one jumps on the trend saying they are really supportive and want to do this and that. Then after a while people realise nothing has really changed and so a new idea is released to allow people to jump on this bandwagon and promote this image yet again. All the while nothing is really happening and industry just keeps getting way with what it has been doing for the last 30 years. Making plastic packaging as best they can to further their profits. If industry were really interested in a sustainable product the first thing the would do is to try to get their packaging back for recycling into more plastic. Yes we see almost none of this happening and to the contrary a lot of opposition to incentives to recycling of plastic waste.
Many of these manufacturing decisions were made back in the 1970s when we all thought the world was inexhaustible and sustainability was not needed to be on any ones radar. Now with higher populations, much more processed food, and much higher plastic production this is not true, yet the manufactures are still operating on this old paradigm. Until that is corrected, and it won’t be corrected voluntarily, little will change. This is what we are seeing with this new buzzword PWC are now saying is the trend, in a couple of more years there will be another one and the manufacturers will still be smiling their way to more plastic production.
There are some very simple things that could be done to control a lot of this.
1) Restrict plastic packaging to just a few types of materials. With all the plastic options in use now, it is too hard to recycle and reuse them all.
2) Put in place a plastics tax on the usage of new plastic material. Let recycled plastic be only 1/2 of this tax. Let biodegradable (in a landfill that is) materials be exempt of the tax.
3) Encourage (through tax incentives) the implementation of landfill biodegradable additives that will let plastic biodegrade away in a few years in a landfill where approx 80% of our plastic waste goes now. Even it if goes to a waste to energy plant, having the landfill biodegradable additive in it will not affect the performance in an incinerator. Plastics with Landfill biodegradable additives in them can be recycled in mainstream recycling unlike other additives. Hence landfill biodegradable additives are really a back stop method to control plastic waste. Recycle and reuse it as much as we can then at the end of the day the plastic goes to an incinerator or sent to a landfill where it will then biodegrade away.
4) Put a refund scheme in place for people to return their plastic waste and get a refund or a shopping coupon, etc. This would hugely increase the recycling or recovery rate at least over night. Who pays for this? The manufacturers of the plastic as the are the ones responsible for making the plastic in the first place.
5) Don’t allow plastic waste to be exported off shore. What is used in a country stays in the country to be reused.
Simple ideas like this put the issue of plastic waste back into the manufacturers hands and when extra cost decisions have to be made when a plastic package is to be used, we will see a big reduction in plastic packaging.
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