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? Why advanced recycling matters – Australia
Posted on August 23, 2022 by DrRossH in Plastic Recycling“The AFGC has been awarded a grant from the government and we’re creating the national plastics recycling scheme to recycle a targeted 190,000 tonnes of soft plastics,” said Cosier. “If those who aren’t aware, a third of all plastic packaging is soft plastics, and it has a recycling rate of about six per cent so it’s a really big problem. But what we want to do is make sure we create a scheme that has a market. Today, we’re going to hear from the whole supply chain.”
He said that with mechanical recycling there has been success stories such as PET milk bottles being recycled back into their original application. However, once you come across coloured plastics and multilayer structures – and soft plastics come into this category too – it becomes more difficult.
“Usually, the best that can be done is basically down cycle,” he said. “You can put it into a durable application – a bollard or something like that. And you can use it one more time. But what we really want is to keep using it over and over again. This is where advanced recycling can really play a role.”
“The barrier for this (recycling more) is obvious – we don’t have collection at scale; we don’t have processing at scale; and we don’t have recycling at scale to close the loop in Australia. In summary, we really want to use advanced recycled material; we know it’s technically possible, but we just can’t get enough of it, fast enough.”
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