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? Soft plastic collection trials under way in Victoria – Australia
Posted on November 30, 2022 by DrRossH in Plastic RecyclingThe first in a series of trials of kerbside collection of soft plastic packaging has begun in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges Shire Council, making recycling of plastics such as bread bags, cereal box liners and ice cream wrappers easy for participating households.
The trials are part of the National Plastics Recycling Scheme project (NPRS), which is led by the Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC) and will help design a model for large-scale “bag-in-bin” kerbside collection and sorting of soft plastic packaging for advanced recycling.
About 487,000 tonnes of soft plastic packaging was used by businesses and homes in Australia in 2019-20 with just four per cent of that material recycled. Diverting soft plastics from landfill will provide a clean stream of material for Australia’s emerging advanced recycling industry.
Plastics from the Macedon Ranges Shire Council trial will be taken for advanced recycling to APR Plastics in Dandenong, Victoria. In advanced recycling, the material is converted into oil that can be used to make new plastics. Darren Thorpe, APR Group Managing Director, said capturing soft plastics in sufficient volumes is essential for a domestic advanced recycling industry.
We’ll be watching this with interest.
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