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? 
The role of landfills in a circular economy – Australia
Posted on October 29, 2020 by DrRossH in Landfills and DisposalSource: The role of landfills in a circular economy – AWRE
If we want to create a circular economy where we reuse and recycle, where we maximise resource value by recovering valuable materials, then the first and most obvious thing we need to do, is stop the one-way flow into landfills.
Waste is like a river that flows downhill to the cheapest price. If we continue to supply cheaply priced landfills, then that is where our waste and our valuable recyclates, are going to go.
It has taken governments a long time to realise that they must intervene in the landfill pricing market if they want to improve recycling rates in Australia. Landfill levies have become the key instrument to rebalance the economics of landfill versus recycling.
However it is not enough.
It is going to take many years to fix this problem and a big change in governments thinking. Consumers have been pushed to a consume and dump mentality in Australia and it may take a generational change to fix this.
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