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? Are bioplastics still plastics?
Posted on September 11, 2015 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsAre bioplastics still plastics? | PlasticsToday.com.
Narayan acknowledged that the pubic relations’ strength of the word biodegradability carries a lot of weight. “All of this biodegradable stuff sounds good. The public loves it! But, I ask, in what environment will this degrade? Define environment. The word biodegradable means nothing.”
But the release says nothing about the year-long mess in the environment—including lakes and oceans—while we wait for the materials to degrade, and why that’s any better than teaching people not to litter. Nor is it better than waste-to-energy methods, which help capture plastics’ fuel qualities.
In the end, plastic is plastic, no matter what environmentally correct prefix you add to it. And plastic is sustainable and it is recyclable. I agree with Narayan when he argued that the industry should channel more of its energy on recycling and waste-to-energy conversion, saying these are “the best use of plastics.”
Discussion · No Comments
There are no responses to "Are bioplastics still plastics?". Comments are closed for this post.Oops! Sorry, comments are closed at this time. Please try again later.