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? 
Container Deposit Schemes: Where to from here? – Australia
Posted on August 9, 2023 by DrRossH in Plastic Recycling
Australia is on the cusp of being the only continent to be fully covered by container deposit refund schemes.
Source: Container Deposit Schemes: Where to from here? – Waste Management Review
Alex Young, Director of the Container Deposit Scheme at the New South Wales Environment Protection Authority (EPA), said while the objective of the NSW scheme when it was introduced in 2017 was to reduce litter, it was also about recycling and encouraging users to keep coming back.
The scheme was designed to be cost effective, at no cost to government – a “proper, extended producer responsibility model where the industry paid for the cost of the scheme”.
It also had to complement the kerbside system and have a robust tracking and verification system to both monitor the scheme’s success and manage the risk of fraud.
Six years on and the scheme is ticking all the boxes, Alex said.
“The proof’s in the pudding.
“We’ve got more than 600 return points, which is significantly more than the minimum required in the legislation, so we know that we’re driving that convenience. We’ve collected over 9.3 billion containers, so we’re seeing good collection rates, we’ve reduced litter by 53 per cent and we’ve doubled the resource recovery rate compared to kerbside prior to the scheme.
“Not only that, but what we’ve seen is really high-quality recycling – bottle-to-bottle recycling.”
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