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? Plastic bag fee needed to wake up shoppers – USA
Posted on May 27, 2016 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting RegulationsTo the Editor:
Source: Plastic bag fee needed to wake up shoppers
Once we realize plastic bags are an “icon of waste” that will profoundly degrade life on this planet, we realize we have three choices. 1. Ban them. 2. Charge a fee. 3. Carry our own recyclable bags.
1. Banning: Jennie Romer, a leading expert on environmental law, observes that banning bags gets lots of support because people like to ban things. But banning does not work because it usually invites legal battles with organizations like American Chemistry Council and because many people use some of the bags for things like pet waste. Banning also leads to paper bag use which creates many of the same problems as plastic.
2. Charging a fee, as Athens, Ohio, is doing, is preferable to banning because it leads shoppers to think about choices: “I’ll pay 10 cents or bring my own bags.” Still, fees are hidden taxes, the collected fees going to store owners, and the bags still accumulate.
3. Bringing our own reusable cloth, washable bags sidesteps the fee, the ban, the political and legal battles, and lets us wash our own cloth bags to guard against bacterial contamination. This makes the best logical sense, but it does not take into account human nature — many will forget to supply our own bags and end up buying bags.
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