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? 
PDK: the new plastic with indefinite recycling capabilities – USA
Posted on May 4, 2021 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsSource: PDK: the new plastic with indefinite recycling capabilities
“Plastics were never designed to be recycled. The need to do so was recognised long afterward,” explained Nemi Vora, first author on the report and a former postdoctoral fellow who worked with Scown. “But driving sustainability is the heart of this project.
“PDKs were designed to be recycled from the get-go, and since the beginning the team has been working to refine the production and recycling processes for PDK so that the material could be inexpensive and easy enough to be deployed at commercial scales in anything from packaging to cars.”
Current mechanical processes for recycling plastic involve melting down the plastic and then reshaping into new products. When many plastics are melted together, the polymers become mixed with a slew of potentially incompatible additives, resulting in a new material that is much lower quality than newly produced virgin resin from raw materials. For this reason, less than 10% of plastic is mechanically recycled more than once.
In the case of PDK plastics, the resin polymers are engineered to easily break down into individual monomers when mixed with an acid. The monomers can then be separated from any additives and gathered to make new plastics without any loss of quality. The team’s earlier research shows that this ‘chemical recycling’ process is light on energy and carbon dioxide emissions, and can be repeated indefinitely, creating a completely circular material life cycle.
The article didn’t say what the source material was for this product. Is it hydrocarbon based or plant based?
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