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? Waging war on plastic and paper cups: Company with a Houston tie offers a plant cup alternative – 2012-Apr-18 – CultureMap Houston
Posted on June 3, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsWhile we commend this person for this concern about plastic waste and actually doing somethign about it, we hope they know the dispsoal problems with compostable plastics.
No one will collect them,
They have to be taken to a special commercial composting facility,
There are no standard makings on the plastic item to show it is a compostable plastic therefore the resorters will not know what it is and just send it to a landfill.
When the do biodegrade in a commercial compost pile they produce CO2 and therefore the stored energy in the plastic molecules is lost.
If or when the infrastructure is set in place to handle compostable plastics, then they will be a good idea.
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