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? Three Headaches for the Recycling Industry -USA
Posted on March 29, 2016 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsThe products that have proved particularly troublesome: diapers, plastic bags and juice boxes.
via Three Headaches for the Recycling Industry.
One way to pay for an approach like this would be for diaper manufacturers to include in the diaper’s sales price the cost of picking up used diapers and peeling them apart. But that is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
This type of action has to happen. Manufacturers have to be held partially responsible for the products they produce. the cost to produce an item is not only its manufacturing cost. We have to begin to account for disposal costs, whether it is recycling, incineration, landfilling etc. Al these have costs and they need to be incorporated into a products cost.
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