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 Plastics Market worth $3,476.87 Million by 2019 –
Posted on September 25, 2014 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste News
For the writer of this report.
Please be aware that a plastic made from plants is not automatically biodegradable. Bioplastics and Biodegradability are mutually independent terms. Polyethylene made from sugar care is the same as polyethylene made from oil. Neither is biodegradable.
When someone says biodegradable, to be correct they ought to tell the reader where it will biodegrade.
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For example PLA is biodegradable under commercial compost conditions. This is not accessible to almost all of the general public. So a plastic bag for example made from PLA is not biodegradable as far as the general consumer is concerned. The USA FTC recognises this and says compost people cannot label their product biodegradable unless the consumer has ready access to a suitable compost facility within a few miles. Otherwise it is green washing and deceitful to the consumer.
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There are some plastics or additives that make plastics biodegradable in a landfill. It is not fast biodegradation, but if a plastic biodegrades within 20 years that is still a good result as we should not be leaving our trash to be dealt with by future generations. Approx 95 % of plastic waste goes to a landfill so there is where biodegradation should be promoted.
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Lastly to not leave anything out, there are additives that make plastic fragment into smaller pieces of plastic. These manufacturers also claim biodegradation which is not fully correct. It is degradation pure and simple, a chemical reaction nothing to do with biology. This is even worse as it makes the plastic piece small enough to be eaten by wildlife and can lead to their early painful demise or get into our food chain. But sadly another case of green washing to mislead the consumer.
Writers need to be technically accurate with the biodegradable claim when making reports like this.
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