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? 
Ban on Microbeads Proves Easy to Pass Through Pipeline – USA
Posted on January 9, 2016 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting Regulations
Ban on Microbeads Proves Easy to Pass Through Pipeline – The New York Times.
A bill to protect the environment was introduced in the House in March. In early December, the House passed the bill. A week later, the Senate passed it as well, without changing a word and by unanimous consent, just before Congress left town on Friday.
That is the strangely charmed life of the Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015, which sailed through Congress in an age when most legislation plods. The new law bans tiny beads of plastic that have been commonly added as abrasives to beauty and health products like exfoliating facial scrubs and toothpaste.
Under the law, companies will have to stop using beads in their products by July 2017.
The problem with the beads, as researchers have discovered, is that they slip through wastewater treatment systems and into waterways. Sherri A. Mason, an environmental chemist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, estimates that 11 billion microbeads are released into the nation’s waterways each day.
Yet another fine example why industry can’t be trusted to act in any ones interest other than their own. They knew this was a problem and many refused to do anything about it. So the government had to step in to make a new law.
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