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? Biodegradable disposables: The garden party
Posted on August 1, 2012 by DrRossH in BioPlasticsBiodegradable disposables: The garden party | MNN – Mother Nature Network.
I like your enthusiasm to get rid of disposable plastic items. But at the current time compostable is not the way to go. Why? Lack of the required infrastructure to get it to where it needs to be to biodegrade. The manufacturers of compostable products know this but don’t let on their product probably never will be biodegraded.
1) Compostable plastics do not biodegrade in a landfill. They need oxygen, high temps and moisture. So if you throw you disposable partyware out to the bin it will not biodegrade but last a long time like a normal plastic.
2) There is no compostable kerbside collections for you compostable waste so how are you going to dispose of it if you don’t want to throw it in the trash?
3) Compostables only biodegrade in a commercial compost facility and are you are prepared to drive many miles to find one so you can drop off your compostable waste? I would think not.
4) They cannot be recycled in main stream as they do not mix with other plastics. They have a number 7 on them which tells the recycler to dispose to trash.
5) On the odd chance they do make it to a commercial compost facility they biodegrade to CO2 and biomass. This leaves no chance to extra any energy out of the plastic waste so all that energy is lost.
So in summary with compostables you have a plastic that cannot be put in the recycle bin, will not biodegrade if disposed to trash. This is even worse than a recyclable conventional plastic. Sounds crazy but that is how it is now. Pressure needs to be bought on to the manufacturers to put the required infrastructure in place so that their materials can biodegrade like they like to tell us they do, otherwise it is simple green washing with no benefits.
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