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? Illinois girl fights bill to ban plastic bag bans
Posted on July 28, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting RegulationsPlastics News – Illinois girl fights bill to ban plastic bag bans.
It strikes us as a little odd that causing a ‘inconvenience ‘ to customers is a greater overriding concern than that of the benefits to the environment and the reduction of plastic waste for us and all our future generations going forwards. Remember a plastic bag is used for a few minutes then it remains for 100’s of years as waste somewhere. Out of site in not out of mind, we have to acknowledge that.
Plus this second reason mentioned,’ there are people employed to make these plastic bags’, so even if they are very harmful to the environment and not really necessary as people can use reusable bags, we have to keep making these bags otherwise these people will lose their job. That is pure spin by the company owners to not change their profits. The plastic bag company can start to make reusable bags and keep those people employed. Better and easier to do that than spend all their funds or lobbying governments and paying legal fees to maintain the status quo and the profits to the company owners. ‘Ah but people don’t need as many reusable bags as they do disposable plastic bags therefore we won’t be able to keep all those people employed’ is an oft cited reason by the bag makers. Doesn’t that tell us something right there. That all these plastic bags are just not necessary. In the 60’s we banned DDT as it was bad for health. Why didn’t we have to keep using it as there were people employed in manufacturing DDT?
People won’t recycle in any big way. That has been proven year after year. Put a recycle bin beside a trash bin and watch what happens, people dump all their waste in the trash bin. They won’t sort it. They have never been educated to as these plastic bag manufacturing companies making it convenient for people have ensured that that is the typical behaviour these days. They don’t want to a) have to foot the bill of a massive multiyear (or decades) long program to now get consumers to change their habits these companies have taught them to do over the last 40 off years. b) foot the bill to get any bags that are recycled back to a reprocessing centre, then clean them and sort them by plastic type and then mix the recyclate with new resin to make new bags. It is far easier and cheaper to just use virgin resin that comes in big truck loads form the resin manufacture to amke a bag than go through all the above rigmarole. c) Let’s not forget for every bag recycled 3 new bags have to be manufactured as these new bags only have about 30% recycled content. What this means if 3 million people recycled their bags, then it would take 9 million people to fully use the bags from the 3 million, then 27 million people to then fully use those bags. And so on.
This all points to the plastic bag is simply a bad product and should be banned. Look at Ireland, they quickly got over their ‘inconvenience’ and moved on with reusable bags to other topics in life more important than the paying a few cents for a bag at the grocery store.
Jazz says:
Post Author September 3, 2012 at 5:20 pmWhile the conservatism of earth’s rseruoces is an honorable trait, so is looking out for our own health. The idea of reusing bags is fine as long as everyone exercises good hygiene. I’m sure you have seen the reports on ecol i bacteria being found on 25% of ladies handbags Many people set their bags on a dirty floor where pet dander, roach excrement, or anything their shoes may have picked up is transferred to the bag. I’d say that Earth Fare shoppers are less likely to behave in this manor, but the fact remains that some people just don’t think about these things. The risk of these contaminated bags coming back to the store and placed exactly where your food is being scanned is enough to make you sick. Until checkout lines are equipped with UV sanitizers or an equivalent we are putting our families health at risk. You really should provide your customers with a means of getting the products out the door without the fear of bringing home a colony of uninvited guest for dinner. Doing away with plastic bags is fine but doing away with reusables would be even better! Paper anyone?