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? Scotland commits to separate recycling collections
Posted on May 27, 2012 by DrRossH in Landfills and DisposalThis is a good move by Scotland. We are concerned about the effectiveness of making households and business presort their waste into the different categories first. Our observations and readings of other areas that have tried this show the people don’t do this too well. It becomes too hard (even though it is very easy to do) and so a lot still gets dumped into the rubbish bin. The scheme that achieves the most efficient recycling collection is single stream recycling where consumers put all their recycling into one bin and it is then sorted at the recycle center, either manually or with technology. It costs more to do it this way, but it does create jobs and it is more successful at getting recycling performed.
Plus we all ought to be enforcing no waste is exported off shore but that if we make it, we use it. That will drive the efficiencies and costings to make the use of recyclate more financially feasible. Plus then too, if we find by following this rule that there is waste we cannot reuse, then perhaps we should think about not using that material in the first place.
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