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? 
British MPs Demand a “Latte Levy” on Disposable Coffee Cups
Posted on February 4, 2018 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting Regulations
Guest essay by Eric Worrall British MPs waging a war on plastic are demanding a “latte levy”, to try to contain the growing environmental catastrophe caused by millions of latte sipping…
Source: British MPs Demand a “Latte Levy” on Disposable Coffee Cups
The committee’s chair, Mary Creagh MP, said: “The UK throws away 2.5 billion disposable coffee cups every year – that’s enough to circle the planet five and a half times.
“Almost none are recycled and half a million a day are littered. Coffee cup producers and distributors have not taken action to rectify this and government has sat on its hands.
“The UK’s coffee shop market is expanding rapidly, so we need to kick start a revolution in recycling.”
Where is such talk in Australia? Now more than ever, if there was a plastics tax and the fund did not go to the general coffers but to a special pool that only funded
a) Clean up and collect the plastic waste and
b) the start up of plastic recycling facilities in Australia so we could use our rubbish instead of trying to find other countries to take on our problem.
The plastics producers (manufacturers and importers) are the ones profiteering out of all this plastic yet are not paying anything to safe guard our planet on this. This has to change and change soon.
Go the UK, maybe Australia will catch up in 20 years.
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