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? How Victoria’s recycling industry ended up in the dumps – Australia
Posted on February 23, 2021 by DrRossH in Landfills and DisposalSource: How Victoria’s recycling industry ended up in the dumps
Two years ago, nearly two-thirds of “recyclables” Victorians dutifully placed in their yellow-topped bins ended up in landfill.
More than 390,000 tonnes of recyclables were dumped in landfills in 2019-20 – nearly four times the level of half a decade ago.
And tens of thousands of tonnes have been incinerated in more than 100 industrial fires in the past three years, many inadvertently fuelled by all those bottles and boxes that didn’t end up where they were meant to.
Proportion of recycling that went to landfill
20,000 tonnes of licence compliance related disposal in March 2019;
220,000 tonnes of operational and safety related disposal in 2019–20.
The governments on both sides here have failed badly. This is going to cost the tax payers $100s of millions and cost the environment a lot of polluting of dangerous chemicals and so much plastic waste.
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