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? 
Why the Queensland CDS needs urgent reform – Inside Waste
Posted on November 20, 2025 by DrRossH in Plastic Limiting Regulations, Plastic Recycling
The Queensland CDS began on 1 November 2018, a year after the breakthrough NSW scheme (Return & Earn), and it isn’t working.
Source: Why the Queensland CDS needs urgent reform – Inside Waste
Now we have the results from the extensive inquiry by the Queensland Parliament’s Health, Environment and Innovation Committee, which received many submissions and held hearings from witnesses (some confidential). Its conclusions are nothing less than astounding, confirming previous concerns and effectively questioning the legitimacy of COEX.
In brief, the Inquiry found issues about:
- The governance framework embedded in the scheme and the governance practices that prevail within COEX;
- the company’s relationship with the operators of container return points (CRPs), who form the ‘backbone’ of Queensland’s scheme, under contractual arrangements with COEX;
- allegations of conflicts of interest, unfair contracts, misleading conduct, and bullying and harassment (some of which have been referred to the Crime and Corruption Commission);
- COEX’s commercial relationship with Circular Economy Systems (CES), a joint venture between its two founding members, Coca-Cola and Lion. CES has received significant – and increasing – payments over the life of the scheme
- a lack of accountability and transparency both around the scheme, and within COEX; and
- it has never achieved the 85 per cent return rate.
Why is no one surprised that giving the drink companies control over a scheme that affects them, is going to have problems.
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