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 far from fantastic for our waterways
Posted on April 11, 2016 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsTHE world’s oceans will contain more plastics than fish by 2050 as plastic, mostly packaging, enters the seas at the rate of a garbage truckload a minute, a report has warned.
via Plastic far from fantastic for our waterways.
Apart from the enormous environmental impact, plastic waste is a huge cost to the global economy, with the WEF finding 95 per cent of the value of plastic packaging is lost after one short use and materials worth $80 billion to $120 billion are lost to the economy each year.
“A staggering 32 per cent of plastic packaging escapes collection systems, generating significant economic costs by reducing the productivity of vital natural systems such as the ocean and clogging urban infrastructure,” the report says.
It also warns that the costs of these after-use impacts plus greenhouse gas emissions add up to $40 billion a year.
This is the part that many do not understand or want to admit. The cost of these lost resources is massive. The materials need to be reused as much as the material properties allow before the are scrapped. Not just scrapped as it is easier to make a new one from virgin materials. This could save countries billions on their import costs and create many local jobs to process it all. Economies of scale would apply once the systems were set up to handle high volumes.
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