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? Call for volunteers to help remove litter from UK beaches
Posted on March 15, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsCall for volunteers to help remove litter from UK beaches.
Based on our own experience of cleaning beaches of litter every month to keep them somewhat clean of trash, the above will mostly be plastic trash including a large number of drink bottles, food containers, straws, plastic cups and a lot of plastic fragments. Just talking about the plastic bottles for a minute here. The irony is just amazing. Consider, this group is calling for a lot of volunteers to go out and pick up all this trash. They get no help from the manufacturers who make the products that become the trash and yet that seems to be ok. Yet when it comes to talk of a bottle deposit scheme which involves people going around on their own volition and picking up plastic bottle trash, the manufacturers strongly oppose such an action saying it is not the best way to go.
This has to be rectified, bottle manufactures make products that cause a lot of enduring trash and litter. A container deposit scheme cost them very little, yet is a very effective method to at least clean up a lot of the litter. This is such an easy shift to make. It works good for everyone. Takes the guilt burden off the manufactures for seeing their products littered all over the place and cleans the environment and actually makes some money for those that want to spend their time picking up the containers.
Of course it does not affect all the other types of plastic litter we find on our beaches. That is a different story and requires more cooperation on the manufacturers to consider the types of materials they are producing and the environment sustainability.
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