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? Firms highlight bio-breakthroughs
Posted on March 12, 2012 by DrRossH in BioPlasticsPlastics News – Firms highlight bio-breakthroughs.
We are glad to see at least one person make the comment “Some materials, like PET, can be bio-based, but they won’t be biodegradable”. That is exactly true. What bioplastics are doing is substituting oil for arable land. That is all. The main concern for plastics is their disposal side or how to eliminate plastic waste from the products these companies make. There is very little to address this with bioplastics. These companies will continue to see their products getting dumped to landfills and dropped as litter.
One commenter said “it must be recycled,” said Mark Mendelson. But if they continue to do nothing about encouraging recycling of their products, nothing will change with respect to the disposal side of plastics. They ought to support container deposit schemes, support active advertising campaigns to promote antilittering, work with councils on kerbside recycling programs. It is a big expense, but they are the ones producing products that make this lack of recycle/litter problem.
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