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? 
Poor recycling market, lightweighting cited in PET recycling drop – Plastics News
Posted on October 16, 2016 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste News
Postconsumer PET container recycling dropped in 2015, most likely due to poor recycling market conditions as well as the impact of lightweighting of bottles, a new study reports.Numbers from the National Association for PET Container Resources and the Association of Plastic Recyclers show that 1.
Source: Poor recycling market, lightweighting cited in PET recycling drop – Plastics News
Negative factors included continued weakness in carbonated soft drink sales, combined with some reductions in single-serving bottle sizes to provide market differentiation and meet consumer demands. Light-weighting of bottles continued to have an impact on some specialty beverage categories, but to a lesser extent than in previous years,” the report states.
While carbonated soft drink sales fell, water bottle sales increased. But because of water bottles are typically of lighter weight “the increase in their sales does not compensate for the loss of soft drink containers in the PET collection stream,” the Oct. 13 report states.
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