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 Pile Up as China Refuses to Take the West’s Recycling
Posted on January 15, 2018 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting Regulations
Since Jan. 1, China has banned imports of 24 kinds of waste, including materials used in plastic bottles, in a campaign against “foreign garbage.”
Source: Plastics Pile Up as China Refuses to Take the West’s Recycling
“We’ve got to start producing less and we’ve got to produce better-quality recyclable goods,” Mr. Ellin said.
Too often, he said, manufacturers produce environmentally harmful products and then “pass the buck” to retailers, who in turn pass it to local councils to pick up the tab to sort out the waste for recycling.
“What’s happened is that the final link in the supply chain has turned around and said: ‘No, we’re not going to take this poor-quality stuff anymore. Keep it for yourself.’”
This is just very bad management by the West. Allowing producers to get away without paying the real cost of their products and passing it on to others. Now hopefully this is the start of putting costs back up the supply chain so that goods sold have a price that reflects the full cost of their production and disposal.
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