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? Foodservice sector defends coffee chains over cup recycling
Posted on December 30, 2011 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsThere are some fair comments in the reply to the Which? report in the link below. Consumers do have a large responsibility to dispose of items in the best manner not just the most convenient manner. However the manufacturers have made it so easy for consumers to get take away cups that it is inevitable that they are not being disposed of properly. In that sense the manufacturers are also responsible for a lot of this trash.
Each coffee cup has a plastic lid and these can be seen littering all over the place. They will last for 100’s of years. How can we make a item that has a life of just 15 minutes then know it will last for 100’s of years after that if it is not recycled? We know at the moment most plastic waste goes to a landfill. So why not make the plastic lids with a landfill biodegradable additive that will allow them to biodegrade if they do go to a landfill. If they get recycled then that is fine too. The addition of the landfill biodegradable additive does not affect mainstream recycling at all. So it becomes a good backstop method to control the plastic waste of these coffee cup lids. This is something manufacturers ought to be doing up front.
It does not as was pointed out above however, stop litter from occurring.
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