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 plastics scheme: The basis of true EPR? – Australia
Posted on July 4, 2023 by DrRossH in Plastic RecyclingRobert Kelman unpacks the National Plastics Recycling Scheme and what it means for Australia’s soft plastics.
Source: Soft plastics scheme: The basis of true EPR? – Inside Waste
There are questions the AFGC must address so all can work together to build a sustainable plastics stewardship scheme, such as will the NPRS:
- Reimburse councils the full costs of collection, transport, sorting, storage and processing of plastics covered under the scheme (assuming kerbside is a viable collection vehicle)?
- Determine eco-modulated producer fees based on the sustainability of the packaging producers use?
- Guarantee long-term off-take agreements for reprocessors to have the certainty they need to invest in capital?
- Outline exactly the level of industry levy being proposed? Will this truly reflect the costs of collection, sorting and processing of recovered materials?
- The NPRS appears to be seeking to embed council-funded kerbside collections as the primary collection mode for soft plastics with a number of ‘orange-bag’ trials currently underway – i.e. we don’t yet know whether this approach of a separate soft plastics bag in kerbside bins works, or whether it will simply add to existing contamination problems in kerbside and many councils and associations are expressing this concern.
The NPRS is being presented as a form of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) potentially modelled on schemes such as Belgium’s ‘Fost Plus’ packaging EPR scheme. 
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