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? Unilever R&D lead on plastics circularity – Australia
Posted on September 13, 2021 by DrRossH in Plastic RecyclingIn Australia, we consume 3.5 million tonnes of plastic annually and five kilograms of plastic enter the ocean per person each year. That’s more than three times the global average. But in our everyday lives it can be easy to forget about these numbers.
Our goal at Unilever is to ensure all our plastic packaging is high-grade and recyclable – we focus on using PET (1), HDPE (2) and PP (5) bottles.
It sounds simple enough in theory, but in practice it can be much more complicated. For example, until recently, number 2 (HDPE) black plastic could not be ‘seen’ by recycling technology and therefore was not being recycled as much as it should be.
Good to see big firms making a start on this. Getting recycled material cost and quality competitive to virgin material is going to be key.
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