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? High school chums start growing industrial plastics recycling business
Posted on March 16, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsPlastics News – High school chums start growing industrial plastics recycling business.
Another example of how rethinking how things are done means businesses are created and people employed in jobs that were not considered in the past. The reuse of materials involved their collection and transport, sorting, reprocess and redistribution. That is a lot of jobs and business opportunities as opposed to simply dump to a landfill and getting more new resources. Making it profitable is the challenge. This is where incentives and government rebates can drive an industry in its infancy to a more mature state.
Sajan says:
Post Author April 5, 2012 at 6:26 pmI thought your mntieon of recycling going bi-weekly was interesting. Perhaps I am a little slow, but this never occurred to me as an option. However, it seems like a fantastic idea to save money. Surely most households have space to store up a few more soda bottles and food containers, especially if they’ve been rinsed out! I think it will be interesting to see what happens, I certainly think it would be a step in the wrong direction for the city to end its reduce its curbside recycling efforts.
Naman says:
Post Author April 7, 2012 at 9:18 amwow, I’ve never seen anything so sitenne before. My friend lived in an officetel and she had to separate quite a bit, but not quite like that. I live in a villa here in Seoul and there is no recycling area. We just put all our recycling in one big bag (not any specially designed bags) and they are picked up along with the trash. I do like that they have special bags for the trash, and they are very affordable. I also make sure to separate the food trash and put it into the 음식물 bag. Because of the great recycling and compost here I don’t have hardly any trash at all!Seoul is generally really great about recycling they have to be since the country is so small. If they generated as much trash as an American, there’d be no where to put it! I like all the separating that goes on in fast food joints. plastic covers in one bin, cups in one bin food waste in another bin. McDonald’s at home should adopt this one. I’m just curious where you come from, Steve. In my town near Boston, we always had free recycling pick up, but it wasn’t mandatory by any means. But, since we had to pay about $3 per week, maybe it encouraged people to recycle more and only put out the trash once every two weeks. I’ve heard from friends in the mid-west that they had to pay about $1.50 per week for the recycling pick up while the trash pick up was free. (which makes absolutely no sense to me, but that’s America for you sometimes ) It sounds like you must have lived in a rather progressive town to have not only recycling but compost pick up!!