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? We dump about 19 billion lbs of plastic into the ocean every year – USA
Posted on February 23, 2015 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting RegulationsWe dump about 19 billion pounds of plastic into the ocean every year.
The problem with plastic waste starts from companies who make all this disposable plastic stuff and let it loose out there. Yes it is the consumer who drops it to make it litter, but if the there was some reasonable constraints on it where these items were ascribed a value then the consumption of all this destructive stuff reduce considerably. Imagine if a drinking straw cost 10 cents, or a plastic bag cost a 1/4, there was a 50 cent refundable deposit on a bottle or can of drink. The reason we don’t have these as yet is the republican style government is so tied to big corporations to make profits at the expense of the rest of us, that they won’t pass any such regulation that would be good for us and the environment.
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