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? US Recycled Plastics Industry
Posted on December 10, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsUS Recycled Plastics Industry | Solid Waste & Recycling Magazine.
However, the overall rate of plastic recycling in the US will remain relatively low — 6.5 percent of total plastic demand in 2016
Export sales (particularly to China) siphon off a substantial portion of plastic scrap, and much of what is processed domestically has high levels of contamination. As a result, only 53 percent of the plastic collected for recycling makes its way to manufactured products in the US market.
That makes about 3.5% of the 100 million tonns of plastic produced each year in the USA is recycled. Thethe other 96.5 million tones must be littered or landfilled. That leaves room for a lot of improvement.
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