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? We consume a credit card worth of plastic each week. What is it doing to our health?
Posted on April 2, 2023 by DrRossH in Plastic Recycling, Plastic Waste NewsA report published in March found there are more than 170 trillion microplastics floating on top of the world’s oceans. Combined they weigh up to 4.9 million tons, which is more than the combined weight of the global human population.
This has harmful ramifications for the environment and for marine life, including “Plasticosis”, a novel disease where plastic exposure causes extensive scar tissue and fibrosis in seabirds. Less is known about the human health impact of these plastics – which have been found everywhere from women’s placentas to polar bears.
There are about 350,000 chemicals used globally, with only a fraction assessed for safety, explains one of the paper’s authors, Dr Nick Chartres: “The majority of these chemicals (petrochemicals in the case of plastics/microplastics) have entered into our environment without any evaluations of their potential harm to human health.”
Now they are in the environment, epidemiological studies to examine the effects can take decades and, as Oliver Jones, a professor in chemistry from RMIT (who was not involved in the review) points out, “ethically it would be hard to justify feeding humans microplastics to see what happened for example”.
“There is a lot of uncertainty. Imminent danger seems unlikely as plastics have been in use since the 1950s and we are all still around,” he says, adding that the dose makes the difference. “We really need more human data to understand the risks here.”
But Chartres, who says the industry uses stalling tactics and demands long-term studies as a way to keep selling their products, says we must act now.
“These plastics are PBTs. Persistent: they don’t ever completely break down; bio-accumulative: they continue to build up in living organisms and, now toxic,” says the Sydney-based father of three. “While we let industry argue over whether these studies provide sufficient, evidence of harm, the world my kids are going to inherit is filling up more and more with plastic.”
There is a consitent lack of concerned effort to change our plastic habits. The problem is a global problem on scale of damge or more of Climate change, so where is the rhetoric on it?
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