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? 
Paper or plastic? West Springfield’s FiberMark develops new paper products to replace plastic
Posted on June 11, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste News
“Replace plastic,” he says.
That means getting manufacturers that use plastic in book covers, file folders, packaging for consumer goods from cognac and Godiva chocolates to board games to use materials made with cellulose.
It is hard to comprehend still that many people like some of the commenters in the above link still think of their own needs over all the others that are to follow. While plastic has been a great engineering achievement, it’s use has been way over abused. The use of plastic to make an item that has a life of just a few minutes then to be discarded to a landfill where it will sit for 100’s of years, or gets released into the ocean to cause even worse problems there makes no engineering sense. We have to get over ourselves and say yes this plastic bag is convenient because I was not organized to spend 30 seconds more to get a reusable bag out of my car to take to the store. The damage all these plastic bags cause is way more than this 30 seconds of inconvenience.
We have arrived a point in time now where most people do not know how to live without disposable plastic items. Yet somehow our parents did. Why do we need a plastic straw when a paper one will do the same job and biodegrade away? The comment above about plastic being broken down to its basic elements is simply false. Ask any plastics engineer. Look up an EPA site. It is not a natural product therefore nature has no natural way to deal with it. So it sits and sits and sits. That is exactly what attracts manufacturers to it. But manufacturers do not care about disposal issues, only their profits.
The only real way to deal with plastics is to make manufacturers carry part of the responsibility of getting the plastic waste their products are making back to their facilities for recycling into new products. Until that happens we are just going to see an ever increasing accumulation of plastic waste. Some authors above may be cool with that but will their kids and their kids and their kids… be thanking us for the pollution we made at this time.
Let’s incentivize plastic recycling to the consumer and the manufacturer to stop plastic waste.
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