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? Australian Bottle Refund Scheme to be Debated Finally!
Posted on February 24, 2014 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting Regulations
The push for a national deposit-return system for beverage containers is about to bubble over in Australia. Politicians will finally debate a cross-country refund scheme next week after leaving it in the icebox for, some say, too long.
This issue pits the continent’s feisty environmental campaigners thirsty for change at Boomerang Alliance against big beverage makers, like Coca-Cola Amatil, Schweppes and Lyon Nathan, and the organization they help to fund, Keep Australia Beautiful. Two of five AU states already add a refund fee payable upon return of the container.
Of an estimated 14- to 15-billion containers consumed each year in AU, eight billion are littered or buried as garbage. Clean Up Australia released its 2013 Rubbish report on Valentine’s Day.
Dumped glass on Sunshine Coast was up 11 per cent and cigarette butt litter increased by 10 per cent in one year.
Non-alcoholic beverage containers are the top littered item followed by cigarette butts, chip bags and other wrappers, bottles and lids and alcoholic beverage containers.
Clean Up Day in Australia is March 2.
What is worse is that nationally only about 25% of plastic bottles are recycled. The rest are littered or landfilled. Their tops, the containers them selves and their plastic labels are ubiquitous across Australia as litter. This CDS would solve all that plus create a number of new jobs for the declining Australian economy. Coke and the others are acting so irresponsible and need to be made to think about the host country they work in more than their cash bottom line all the time. The ironic thing is if coke looked past more than a 12 month window they would see if they came out and endorsed such a great environmental initiative they would win back a lot of friends and hence more customers! So short sighted.
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