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? ‘It’s greenwash’: most home compostable plastics don’t work, says study – UK
Posted on November 4, 2022 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste News
Materials put into domestic compost are failing to disintegrate after six months – the only solution is to use less.
“The bottom line is that home compostable plastics don’t work,” said Prof Mark Miodownik, an author of the paper, published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainability. “Let’s just stop. Let’s not pretend to ourselves that it’s going to be some sort of panacea, and you can sell people stuff without really having infrastructure to deal with the waste and hope that it’s all going to go away.”
The study showed that most of the plastic that people put in their home compost shouldn’t be there anyway. Researchers found 14% of plastic packaging items were certified “industrially compostable” and 46% have no compostable certification (for example they could be “100% biodegradable”, which typically means it cannot be composted).
People are confused by the labels, and struggle to work out what goes where, yet 85% of people remain enthusiastic about buying compostable plastics, the report said.
IT should be noted too that compostable materials are not recyclable either. They perpetuate the liner economy. Use less is the only option.
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