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? 
Plastics just the tip of the iceberg – Australia
Posted on May 21, 2024 by DrRossH in Plastic Recycling
A worthy topic given the damage that both fossil fuels and the lifecycle of plastics are doing to the planet
Source: Plastics just the tip of the iceberg – Inside Waste
What this discussion has highlighted is just how difficult it is to recover and recycle in the absence of design requirements (from polymer standards to chemical inclusions), extended producer responsibility obligations (to fund and manage its lifecycle) and only limited to no market demand for this recovered material.
And no matter how hard we hope that all these elements will one day magically fall into place, they simply will not – the packaging system proved that.
Regrettably with all the effort of respective governments over recent years to address plastics (single-use plastic bans implemented, container deposit schemes introduced, export restrictions, Recycling Modernisation Funding) we have barely moved the dial. The Australian Plastics Flows and Fates report states the national plastic recovery rate was just 14 per cent for 2020/21 – up from 11.8 per cent in 2016/17 – a growth rate of less than one per cent a year. The tap needs to be turned off at the source, and the producer made to sit at the table.
Discussion · No Comments
There are no responses to "Plastics just the tip of the iceberg – Australia". Comments are closed for this post.Oops! Sorry, comments are closed at this time. Please try again later.