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? What it really takes to create a circular economy – Australia
Posted on September 29, 2025 by DrRossH in Plastic RecyclingYet for all the consultation, Australia still lacks the one thing that would enable a safe and functioning circular economy: regulation.
Source: What it really takes to create a circular economy – Inside Waste
As Usual Gayle Sloan has the story right.
In Australia, the circular economy has become something of a buzzword – a vision celebrated in strategy papers, stakeholder workshops, and target-setting forums. Yet for all the consultation, communiqués and roundtable photo opportunities, Australia still lacks the one thing that would truly enable a safe and functioning circular economy: regulation.
The reality is: without regulation, bad actors continue business
as usual, while responsible producers are left carrying the load. Australia urgently needs:
- National eco-design laws, modelled on the EU’s approach.
- Mandatory Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), with enforceable targets and penalties.
- A national product safety and materials register, to track and verify circular readiness.
- Consistent legislation across states, so that circular business models don’t face a patchwork of barriers.
Globally, the “circularity gap” is widening. The 2024 Circularity Gap Report found that despite growing awareness, the global economy is only 7.2 per cent circular – down from 9.1 per cent in 2018. Australia is not immune. While we increase recovery rates in some streams, we are also increasing total material consumption in others.
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