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? Govt to review packaging covenant and NEPM – Australia
Posted on February 18, 2021 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsThe Australian federal government has announced a review of the Australian Packaging Covenant and National Environment Protection (Used Packaging Materials) Measure 2011 (NEPM).
The Covenant is an agreement to reduce the environmental impacts of packaging and is in place between the country’s federal, state, territory, and local governments, along with organisations within the packaging supply chain, managed and administered by the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation (APCO)
Rose Read, National Waste and Recycling Industry Council (NWRIC) CEO, also welcomes the review as she believes for the most part, the program has failed, considering many of the packaging issues the country faced back when it was implemented 20 years ago still exist today.
“The NWRIC considers the only way to solve the packaging issues that face Australia is to mandate recycled content, to penalise companies who do not meet sustainable packaging guidelines or labelling, and to implement a mandatory product stewardship scheme that sees end-of-life packaging costs shifted from local councils to the companies who put the products on the market.”
What is important here is that the government has failed in the last 20 years to address the plastic waste issue. APCO won’t admit it, but NWRIC makes it quite clear. The current government plan to have all plastic recyclable or compostable by 2025 is just going to kick the can down the road for another 10 years. It will be business as usual for most businesses working with plastic packaging, except then they will be able to claim they are ‘meeting the governments requirements of reducing plastic waste’. The country needs more companies like Biogone to stop this every increasing plastic waste build up.
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