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? 2023 could be turning point for waste industry – Australia
Posted on March 23, 2023 by DrRossH in Plastic RecyclingWith the Circularity Gap report stating that only eight per cent of global materials are circular and over 70 per cent of global emissions stem from material management, the recent Federal directions are necessary, and the set targets non-negotiable. However, we are still miles away from where we need to be.
The penny may have dropped but five years on, we continue to consume too much, with an overwhelmingly proportion of products being made from virgin material. This is despite numerous conversations, the most recent at this year’s COP27, on the need to change consumption and production
We have had a sobering wake-up call with the release of the National Waste Data report, which tells us that even with a plan, we are still not on the path! To get to where we must go, we need to bring on two million additional tonnes of demand for recycled products and material every year from now until 2030, which means another 14 million tonnes of recovery infrastructure alone. That’s not to mention the design, behaviour, and regulatory change needed to support this.
Al ong way to go.
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