Advancing plastics recycling in Australia
Posted on February 22, 2022 by DrRossH in Plastic Recycling, Plastic Waste NewsSource: Advancing plastics recycling in Australia

Plastics manufacturer Qenos and recycling company Cleanaway have agreed to develop a feasibility study of plastic-to-plastic advanced recycling. The organisations will be looking into how to create a circular economy by recycling up to 100,000 tons per year of soft and mixed plastics waste into recycled polyethylene plastic for use in new, food-grade plastic packaging.
It is a start. How long will this trial take and then how long to decide to scale it up or not. Years. If Aust uses 3MT per annum then 0.1 MT is 3% of Australia’s plastic waste problem. With no government intervention, it leaves a long way to go.

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?
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