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? UN Paper on Plastics in the Oceans 2106
Posted on January 22, 2016 by DrRossH in Plastic & Wildlifehttp://unep.org/gpa/documents/publications/BiodegradablePlastics.pdf
Great to see such a serious topic get more and more media coverage. It is a complicated topic and hard to get all the facts right.
The comment on oxo-degradable seems to be accurate as not being valid as a biodegradable claim.
Another plastics expert comment with this:
The UN paper is riddled with errors. One error was the assumption that there are no biodegradable plastics except for PLA, and oxodegradable plastics. They incorrectly identified PMMA as biodegradable. They misread a study about Mater-Bi, and confused it with starch. They referred to an obsolete and withdrawn ASTM standard for ocean biodegradaton of plastics. They misidentified polycaprolactone as a hard, durable plastic. They identified a rare plastic, PES, as common, etc. In general, it seemed as though it had been written by a high school student in a hurry.
So good to see the coverage but they need to be more specific in what they say as people believe this as the trust in most cases.
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