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 industry scrambles to solve our dirty waste secret – New Zealand
Posted on January 21, 2018 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting Regulations
New Zealand options for its recycling are shrinking. but it’s still shipping waste offshore.
Source: Recycling industry scrambles to solve our dirty waste secret
China notified the World Trade Organisation of its new standards in July last year, so New Zealand’s recycling brokers had already organised alternative locations but those places were more expensive.
It was now cheaper to send plastic to landfill than give it to companies who shipped it offshore, she said.
Morgan said companies that sorted mostly plastic, like Visys, were feeling the heat of skyrocketing prices following the China ban.
All up, the plastic waste we shipped overseas last year was worth $13.2 million, every kilogram of plastic earning an average of just 25 cents.
More than 7 million kilograms of New Zealands plastic waste was shipped to China last year. Hong Kong, a separate import jurisdiction, received 13.5 million kg, and another 19 million kg was sent to Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam
She agreed that millions of kilograms of recyclable rubbish being sent to Asia was “probably not” common knowledge to New Zealanders.
All countries, if they want to us plastic should be able to reuse it or recycle into something else useful. If they can’t then disincentivise it’s us by putting a plastics tax on it to force industry to find another sustainable material. That is quite simple!
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