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? A Plan to Go Halfway Around the World, Fueled by Plastic Trash – NYTimes.com
Posted on October 17, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsA Plan to Go Halfway Around the World, Fueled by Plastic Trash – NYTimes.com.
The fuel in question will come from Cynar, a British company that has developed a technology that makes diesel out of so-called end-of-life plastics — material that cannot be reused and would otherwise end up in landfills.
Durable, cheap and lightweight, plastic erupted onto the world stage in the 1950s. Designers and engineers recognized its usefulness for industries as diverse as bottling, construction, aerospace and retailing. Since then, global output of plastic has ballooned, reaching more than 300 million tons last year, according to the trade association PlasticsEurope.
The problem is that the vast majority of plastic — perhaps 85 percent — is not reused or recycled. Most ends up in landfills or, worse, the oceans, where the swelling mass of disintegrating plastic now poses a serious environmental threat. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calls marine debris “one of the most pervasive pollution problems facing the world’s oceans and waterways.”
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