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? 
Volunteer Beach Patrol groups pick up plastic litter
Posted on May 5, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste News
Plastic Fragments
At PWS we volunteer our time to clean up local beaches once a month with a group called 3207BeachPatrol. This essentially is picking up plastic trash off the beaches as that is 99% of what is on there. Either from washing in on the tide, dropped as litter by beach goers or washed down from a storm water drain and dumped on to the beach.
The clean up is limited to 1 hour a month and generally about 15-20 people turn out to pitch in. The group patrols one of the local city beaches separated by piers. Today about 150 kg of trash was picked up along approx 400 m of beach.
One picture shows the crew at work. Another is a fine example of the types of little fragments that pollute the beaches. A good example of why oxodegradable plastics should be banned as they just cause the plastic items to fragment which makes the plastic pollution so much worse. It take about 5 seconds to pick up a plastic bag as a single item, but 5 minutes to pick up a plastic bag that has fragmented into 100’s of little peices. Imagine what the wildllife do with these little pieces of plastic.
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