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? Bagging the Rhetoric on Plastic Bag Recycling – USA
Posted on July 23, 2013 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsBagging the Rhetoric on Plastic Bag Recycling | The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram.
But last week the Bangor Daily News reported a sobering reality: Maine’s largest recycling company, ecoMaine, grosses barely $4-5 per TON for recycled plastic bags. That’s when they’re lucky enough to find a buyer.
That’s not an economically real market, despite bag makers’ constant refrains. It’s a smokescreen.
In fact, there’s little market for any #3, #4, #5, #6, or #7 plastics. ecoMaine’s website has great public information including monthly sales totals.
There is clearly an attempt by industry to not let the news get out on the real situation with their plastic waste. Be it plastic bags, bottles, cups, coffee cup lids etc. They know if the general public understood what these products were doing to the environment, there would be a large cut back in consumption. Examples are Coke fighting any deposit scheme for drink bottles. If there was a large scheme in place the spot light would come on the billions and billions off bottles collected ever month. The drink companies don’t want this known as it would show them up as irresponsible uses of plastic. Plastic bag companies are the same, they want to sell trillions of them but not be responsible for one of them as they have no solution for returned bags.
Discussion · No Comments
There are no responses to "Bagging the Rhetoric on Plastic Bag Recycling – USA". Comments are closed for this post.Oops! Sorry, comments are closed at this time. Please try again later.