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? 
Waste myth: “Landfill levies don’t work” – Australia
Posted on May 14, 2023 by DrRossH in Plastic Recycling
The graph above clearly shows that the per capita waste to landfill has decreased in direct proportion to the rise in State landfill levies. There is noise in the data and a lag between rising levies and behaviour change due, I believe, to the delay in getting sorting and processing infrastructure approved and built.
MRA has analysed the regression analysis between state recovery rates and landfill levies and shown that 70 per cent of the growth in recycling in Australia in the last 20 years can be explained by the rise in landfill levies.
No other policy instrument has had the effect that Australia’s landfill levies have. Of course, it would be remiss of me not to say that regulations or outright bans on landfill would be equally, if not more effective. But state governments have so far shown little appetite for bans to landfill. EPR systems also work but so far they have been limited to specific small waste streams such as mobile phones, drink containers or TVs. Similarly, no government has yet introduced economy wide taxes on virgin material use or tax subsidies for the use of recycled content in new materials. So, the levies remain our best current approach.
Levies plus EPR would go a long way to reducing waste and that is dumped and instraed recorver materizsl for recycling.
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