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? ‘Waste Wars’: A Conflict With No End in Sight – EcoWatch
Posted on April 11, 2025 by DrRossH in Plastic Recycling, Plastic Waste News
In his new book Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, Alex Clapp explores how trash became an object of commerce.
Source: ‘Waste Wars’: A Conflict With No End in Sight – EcoWatch
Waste Wars ends up in plastics being shipped around the world. Plastics, of course, are intrinsically difficult to recycle, and yet in the mountains of Indonesia, the population there has almost been forced to deal with Western plastic waste.
“Indonesia is a place where domestically discarded plastic, there’s as much a chance that it ends up in the ocean as it ends up in a landfill,” Clapp said. “And yet somehow in the middle of Java, in the middle of these mountains, you have these towns which are now competing at gunpoint at times over western plastic waste, because there’s money to be made.
“Those contaminants, those toxins are being ingested hourly by great numbers of Indonesians. So, it’s just this really sordid business. And it just goes to show that trash is one of these things where you develop all kinds of derivative economies.”
Ultimately, Clapp sees no end to the trade in waste.
“This is essentially worthless material that’s dangerous and difficult and expensive to get rid of,” he said. “The supply is endless. I mean, look at all this stuff we throw away. If you got into this business, you would never, ever, run out of material to ship. The other thing is, you know, unlike drugs, if you get caught shipping trash, it’s a theoretical slap on the wrist.”
Discussion · No Comments
There are no responses to "‘Waste Wars’: A Conflict With No End in Sight – EcoWatch". Comments are closed for this post.Oops! Sorry, comments are closed at this time. Please try again later.