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? Let’s Get Circular; It Is the Only Way We Won’t End Up Buried in Garbage
Posted on September 14, 2021 by DrRossH in Plastic Recycling, Plastic Waste News75 years ago, if you wanted a cup of coffee or a bite to eat, you went to a restaurant or diner, sat down and got served your coffee in a porcelain mug and ate off a china plate. There were no litter bins on the street because there wasn’t much litter. It was pretty much a closed, circular system where the restaurant owner sold you food or coffee and kind of rented you the vessel you ate or drank from.
By the 1960s, private automobiles had taken over American roads and fast-food joints catering almost exclusively in food to-go became the fastest growing facet of the restaurant industry.” Now we were all eating out of paper, using foam or paper cups, straws, forks, everything was disposable. But while there may have been waste bins at the McDonalds’ parking lot, there weren’t any on the roads or in the cities; this was all a new phenomenon.
KAB downplayed industry’s role in despoiling the earth, while relentlessly hammering home the message of each person’s responsibility for the destruction of nature, one wrapper at a time. ….KAB was a pioneer in sowing confusion about the environmental impact of mass production and consumption.
We are trained from our first Playmobil set that recycling is among the most virtuous things that we can do in our lives. Studies have shown that for many people, it is the ONLY “green” thing that they do. And it is an extraordinary scam. We have come to accept that we should carefully separate our waste and store it, then pay serious taxes for men in special trucks to come and take it away and separate it further, and then try and recover the cost by selling the stuff.
When China closed its doors to our waste it became essentially worthless. The entire recycling system has been exposed as a Potemkin Village where a lot of people look busy and it costs everybody a lot of money, but doesn’t really do much at all except make people feel good.
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If we are truly going to go circular, we have to change more than just our coffee cups, we have to change our culture. We started this slideshow with Edward Hopper and will end with it because one could go on forever, but it is a culture of sitting down in restaurants, of drinking coffee like Italians, buying beer in refillable and returnable bottles like they do in most of the world. It is going to require lifestyle changes and some loss of convenience. But we do also get to slow down and smell the coffee. It might be fun.
Such a good article, well worth reading the whole piece.
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