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? EPI Applauds UK Government Study Finding Plastic Bags Unfairly Targeted as ‘Environmental Villains
Posted on July 1, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsThis is a typical comment from a manufacturer whose main concern is their profits not the betterment of the environment for us all. EPI makes a additive that causes plastic bags to break down into little pieces of plastic over 1-2 years. Whether you want it to or not. That is far worse for the environment than the original bag.
Plastic bags are the #1 item in landfill. The concept that people reuse the grocery store type bags over and over again is nonsense. At best they get used one more time as a bin liner or doggie poop bag then get dumped to trash to go to a landfill. Bags made with EPI product do not breakdown in a landfill as the chemical reaction of their product requires oxygen to work, which is in short supply in a landfill. Since over 95% of bags in the USA go to a landfill, the EPI additive has no benefit what so ever.
So a bag ban is the only sensible way to go to stop the large problem of plastic bag waste accumulation.
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