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? City mulls over new options for waste processing – India
Posted on May 29, 2012 by DrRossH in Landfills and DisposalThe Hindu : Cities / Kochi : City mulls over new options for waste processing.
There are some complications here that I hope the reviewers are aware of.
For plastic to be converted to manure, it has to be a compostable plastic material. THis requires a special plastic material to be used to make the plastics from in the first place. Many bioplastics are compostable under commercial composting conditions. Petroleum plastics are not. If the plastics are not compostable plastics, they will not convert to manure.
Conversion to liquid fuel can be done with most plastics yes.
Disposal in a Waste to Energy plant is also a good option to eliminate plastic. But it is not low cost to set up and requires all the waste plastic to be collected and sent to the WTE plant. How would that be achieved if it is lying as litter everywhere now?
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