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? Urgent government action needed to protect Australia’s plastic packaging recycling future
Posted on January 14, 2026 by DrRossH in Plastic RecyclingAustralia uses more than 1.3 million tonnes of plastic packaging each year – most of it imported – yet more than one million tonnes end up landfilled or littered. That’s the equivalent of about 100,000 garbage trucks full of plastic, forming a continuous line from Melbourne that stretches past Sydney.
Although Australian recyclers have the capability to process recyclable plastic, limited demand for locally recycled plastic packaging is placing facilities at risk of scaling back or closing. This would mean more plastic waste, greater reliance on imported plastics, the loss of thousands of local jobs and greater adverse climate impacts.
If implemented within the current term of government, the analysis found over the next five years packaging reforms would:
- Reduce the amount of plastic waste polluting the environment by 370,000 tonnes a year.
- Increase economic activity in Australia by $2.5 billion in gross value-add.
- Spur additional investment of $220 million in private capital.
- Create almost 20,000 new jobs.
- Reduce CO₂ emissions from plastic by 700,000 tonnes a year.
Action needed, but if there is no demand for the newly processed recyclate, what is going to happen to that? Just shifted the bottle neck to the next stage.
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