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? BLOG: Can Chemical Recycling Solve the Plastic Waste Crisis?
Posted on May 30, 2019 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsCarlos Monreal, CEO of PLASTIC ENERGY, explains that with the changes to the Basel Convention restricting shipments of hard-to-recycle waste to poorer countries, waste exporters have to find a way to recycle to face their responsibilities…
Source: BLOG: Can Chemical Recycling Solve the Plastic Waste Crisis?
At the moment, higher income countries have not developed the necessary infrastructure to deal with their own waste and have preferred exporting waste than keeping up with innovations in the field of recycling that could address this exported waste. In these conditions, naturally, the policies and regulation in place are behind the curve.
We need some radical changes to drive a truly circular economy but the onus is now on the recyclers to show the way supported by government, regulators and the whole value chain.
When end-of-life plastic waste can be converted into something of value to be used over and over again there is little logic in burying, burning or exporting it to developing countries which only creates more pollution on a planet that has suffered enough – and it actually even goes against the Waste Hierarchy established by the EU.
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