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? US states banned from exporting their trash to China are drowning in plastic – Quartz
Posted on October 3, 2013 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsUS states banned from exporting their trash to China are drowning in plastic – Quartz.
For every ton of reusable plastic, China has received many more tons of random trash, some of it toxic. That has helped build “trash mountains” so high they sometimes bury people alive (link in Chinese). For a country facing environmental crisis after environmental crisis, this is no longer tenable.
A country should not be allowed to exports it trash to another. If you make the mess you should deal with it. However, is one countries trash another’s treasure? It is a debate you will get different answers to depending on what your role in the chain is. If you were a plastic bottle maker, then you certainly don’t want to see plastic mounds of bottle lying around as the public would be put off by this ugly pollution. If you are a plastics recycler, then maybe you do want all this plastic collected for recycling.
China needs to be congratulated for putting some cleaning and quality restraints on accepting plastic waste. They are not the dumping ground of the West. The West has to set its own quality standards of what they export rather than considering it as dumping of their waste, then figure out how to deal with their waste. For too long irresponsible manufacturers have had free reign on what they produce with no responsibility of the disposal of their products. This needs to change if we are going to manage out own trash at home.
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