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? Su Abeysuriya: Green feel-good factors and the ‘ethical anti’ consumer
Posted on December 1, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsWhile not related to plastic waste so much, this article discusses what makes a person pick a sustainable product over a product that does not offer any sustainable elements.
For plastic waste to become a thing of the past, all plastic products need to have sustainability build into them at the outset, not as an after thought. Either make the product recyclable and provide consumer incentives to get it recycled i.e get recycling over 80% , or make it landfill biodegradable so that either way we are not accumulating plastic waste in a landfill or the ocean somewhere.
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