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? Environmental crunch worse than thought
Posted on March 16, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsEnvironmental crunch worse than thought | Herald Sun.
“The report, OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050, reissued appeals for a change in policy.
Pollution should be made more expensive, such as by scrapping environmentally-damaging subsidies for fossil fuels, it said.
And natural assets should carry a monetary value that is factored into pricing, so that their true worth is appreciated.
“Progress on an incremental, piecemeal, business-as-usual basis in the coming decades will not be enough,” it said.”
Pollution includes the accumulation of plastic waste and health damage that is doing us all. Product pricing needs to have a disposal fee built into to to allow its recovery for recycling or proper disposal. We need to learn the cost of an item is not the cost to manufacture it, but it is the manufacture cost PLUS the disposal costs. Many packaging materials used to day have large disposal costs compared to their manufacture cost and once those are incorporated into the pricing model, those items will loose appeal to be used and more appropriate materials will be used.
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