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? L.A.’s sweeping ban not yet in the bag
Posted on May 23, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting RegulationsL.A.’s sweeping ban not yet in the bag – latimes.com.
“By some estimates, the amount of plastic bags in California’s waste stream is in the thousands of tons, many of them are not biodegradable, and the cost of disposal is in the many millions.
I once slogged through Compton Creek with Heal the Bay, before L.A. County supervisors beat the L.A. City Council to the punch and banned plastic bags and reported a 94% reduction in the use of plastic bags, and they were wrapped around plants and layered into the banks like lasagna. Everyone has seen them draped against fences, dancing down streets and clogging storm drains. A 2010 survey by Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup found that plastic bags were second on the floating litter list behind cigarette butts and ahead of food wrappers, caps, lids, cans and bottles. Paper bags rounded out the top 10.
Koretz said only a small fraction of plastic bags manufactured in California end up in Los Angeles, so claims of big local job losses are nonsense. He said there’s a local program in which veterans are producing reusable bags, and he thinks more green jobs would be created with a plastic ban.”
Discussion · No Comments
There are no responses to "L.A.’s sweeping ban not yet in the bag". Comments are closed for this post.Oops! Sorry, comments are closed at this time. Please try again later.