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? 
Recycling giant Waste Management sees future in film recovery – USA
Posted on May 12, 2023 by DrRossH in Plastic Recycling
Plastics are just a small fraction of the recyclables collected and processed by Waste Management Inc., and film is just a small fraction of those plastics. But plastics, including film, have value, and the nation’s largest solid waste management company wants to up its game in that market.
To help propel the Houston-based company in the film recycling arena, Waste Management recently took a controlling interest in Avangard Innovative’s U.S. film recycling operations in Waller, Texas, near Houston, that were then renamed Natura PCR.
“If you look at plastics for WM, especially on the recycling side, it’s only about 5 percent of the material we collect every day in our customers’ bins. But it represents about 40 percent of the value, and it also represents nearly 100 percent of the conversations we have,” said Brent Bell, vice president of recycling at Waste Management.
Films have long been the scourge of MRFs, which have historically relied on equipment call screens at the beginning of the sortation process. This equipment, sometimes called disc or star screens, are actually horizontal spinning shafts that initially separate paper and cardboard from heavier recyclables such as metal, rigid plastics and even glass in some cases. Mounted onto the shafts are discs that allow paper to flow over while containers drop down between openings between the shafts.
It’s an approach that’s both effective for most of the recycling stream but also essentially thwarts collection and sortation of film through the typical MRF. That’s because films tend to get caught up and wrap around the shafts, building up to a point where employees have to shut down the entire line and go in to manually cut out the film that’s clogging up sortation.
With today’s focus on plastics and their role in society, as well as their unwanted presence in the environment, there’s never been more interest in recycling rates.
For plastic film, they are minuscule at about 2 percent. This compares with recycling rates of just under 30 percent for both PET and high-density polyethylene bottles. Even those higher numbers for rigid containers routinely get slammed by plastic critics, and industry insiders admit they have to do better.
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