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? Inside the Plastic Industry’s Battle to Win Over Hearts and Minds – USA
Posted on November 30, 2024 by DrRossH in Plastic RecyclingDocuments leaked from an industry group show how plastics companies are pushing back against a “tide of anti-plastic sentiment.”
Source: Inside the Plastic Industry’s Battle to Win Over Hearts and Minds – The New York Times
The campaign’s messaging was at times misleading. One paid TikTok influencer who posts about her family’s life on the road in an R.V. claimed that “PET bottles are a closed-loop, zero-waste system.”
In fact, despite being recyclable, PET remains a major source of plastic waste and microplastics, those extremely small pieces of plastic debris. According to NAPCOR’s annual report, less than 30 percent of PET plastic bottles were recycled in the United States in 2022, a rate that has remained largely unchanged for the past decade. Plastic that is not recycled is incinerated or ends up in landfills or the environment.
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The Positively PET campaign dates to 2018, when a NAPCOR subcommittee made up of oil giant BP, packaging company Amcor and other members mulled ways to combat what internal documents describe as a “tide of anti-plastic sentiment.” (BP has since sold its petrochemical business to INEOS, which remains a member.)
The association enlisted the public relations firm, Aloysius Butler & Clark, which noted that “voices calling for safe, environmentally conscious packaging alternatives are growing louder.” Its solution: a social media campaign centered around the “Positively PET” slogan.
The deceiptfulness of these plastic companies is never ending. They have no moral compass.
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