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? Recovery is the path to circularity – USA
Posted on January 17, 2025 by DrRossH in Plastic RecyclingToday, sustainability is defined as circularity, the ability to make a product and, at the end of its life, convert the material elements into the same product. Closing the loop lessens the need for more virgin materials, reduces emissions and instills the value of resource recovery.
Source: Recovery is the path to circularity | Plastics News
Mechanical recycling has its limits despite the advances in quality and scale. Advanced molecular recycling is an emerging option to recover the value of hard-to-recycle materials, improve recycling rates and strive toward full circularity. But critics have assailed advanced molecular recycling in its many iterations, because 100 percent of the offtake applications are not circular or because the yield of the process is “too low” or “only suitable for fuels. Purists maintain that EPR schemes direct funds to solely to 100 percent circular systems and regulators fall for NGOs’ classification of advanced recycling as “incineration” and to be shunned. Should we then toss technologies aside that recover the value of materials at the end of life that are not circular yet? Should we, for example, not build plants to convert waste plastics and tires to hydrogen for conversion to fuel cells or electricity, or aviation and marine bunker fuel because they are not 100 percent circular even though the transition to more sustainable methods to power transportation could be decades away from wholesale adoption?
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