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? Pack firms support plans for ‘Clean Europe Day’
Posted on December 10, 2012 by DrRossH in GeneralA similar event happens in Australia once a year. Called Clean Up Australia Day, (CUAD). On this day 1000’s of volunteers go out and a number of corporations encourage their staff to contribute too. They pick an area be it a beach, a stretch of road, a park etc and pick up all the trash in it, from Coke/Pepsi bottles, MacDonalds plastic cups, old tyres,.. And send them to a landfill. Some more active organisations do a litter sort and categorise the litter by type, bottles, cigarettes, straws etc to find out the worst offenders. (Which then points to the industries responsible for making the most polluting items).
What we have to be careful of is industries that make polluting items do not rely on volunteers to clean up the waste their products make without any responsibility put back on these manufacturers.
Australia has a small population compared to Europe so it will be a huge challenge to organise a Europe wide trash collection day.
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