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? 
Process converts mixed plastic waste into hydrogen fuel – USA
Posted on July 16, 2026 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste News
A new chemical process developed by researchers has the potential to convert mixed plastic waste into high-purity hydrogen.
Source: Process converts mixed plastic waste into hydrogen fuel – Inside Waste
Plastic is used extensively in products ranging from drink bottles and shopping bags to vehicle dashboards. However, recycling remains a major challenge because most existing processes require plastics to be separated by type before they can be processed. As a result, only a small proportion of discarded plastic is recycled, with the majority ending up in landfill or being incinerated.
Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Samueli School of Engineering and Ewha Womans University in South Korea have developed a process that converts three of the world’s most common plastics into hydrogen fuel in a single reactor.
The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses a process known as alkaline thermal treatment (ATT), where sodium hydroxide reacts with organic material under heat to produce hydrogen. The method processes mixed polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) together, producing hydrogen with a purity exceeding 90 per cent without requiring the plastics to be sorted.
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