Plastic & Waste

[UP]

I visit restaurants everyday due to work reasons and what wobbles my head is the mere rise of single use plastic. You will be surprised the amount of single use plastic has been in the grocery and restaurant business for last few years. Single use plastic was not the case 8-10 years ago. It’s use has increased a lot and fast food and on-go or take-out restaurants are a major threat to environment. Restaurants with dine-in are also reverting to plastic to put food in. And after customers are done with their sushi - out goes the plastic container in garbage bin.

Single use plastic is a major threat to environment and to oceans. There’s a report that states there will be a time when there will be more platic than fishes in oceans across the world.

Countries like India/Pakistan where recycling is non-existent and the amount of population those counties have - imagine the amount of plastic waste they create every single day. If plastic is not recycled - it can take hundreds of years to decompose.

The good thing is governments are waking up and have started to tackle this issue. UK is in the process to ban one time use of plastic straws. Its a good start. But we have to be more agressive to tackle this major threat.

McDonald’s has also stated that they will ban straws from their restaurants starting next year in the UK and Ireland.

 

[TM Riddle]

http://www.thehindu.com/news/intern...ergency-amid-sea-of-waste/article22291714.ece

 

[Syed1]

Plastic bags have even been found in the deepest parts of the ocean..... so we as a race definitely have a plastic problem that needs addressing ASAP.

 

[Itachi]

Not a plastic advocate but give me an alternative for bringing meat, fish, frozen foods from the market without the use of plastic.

 

[maverick85]

China’s trash ban forces Europe to confront its waste problem

“We are juggling,” said Nicole Couder, EU affairs officer at global waste management firm Suez. “We are reaching a point where we have too much stock … We’re going to have a drastic issue in a short-term perspective. We are reaching this crisis stage now … I don’t think we can’t stress enough the impact of China.”

‘A gamechanger’
As garbage problems cascade across the Continent, the European Commission is seizing the crisis to promote its vision of a clean economy.

The Commission’s Plastics Strategy, announced in January, aims to make all plastic packaging recyclable or reusable by 2030, something that it says could create 200,000 jobs. For that to happen, Europe’s capacity to sort and recycle waste would have to be multiplied fourfold — something that would cost as much as €16.6 billion.

“We mostly export,” said Commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen while presenting the strategy. “This does not make any sense in economic or sustainability terms. We are throwing away 95 percent of the value of plastic packages and only 5 percent is retained in our economy.”

Ireland, the highest per capita producer of plastic waste, depended on China to deal with 95 percent of its plastic waste.

The Commission is also considering a tax on virgin plastics to make recycled plastics more attractive. Low oil prices mean new plastics are much cheaper to produce than recycled ones.

“It would be a gamechanger,” Antonino Furfari, director of Plastics Recyclers Europe, said of a plastic tax.

In addition, EU countries agreed last December to raise recycling targets for other packaging materials — paper and cardboard, metals and glass — to 70 percent by 2030.

Two-speed recycling
All these steps are still pretty far into the future, however, and in the meantime, some EU countries are finding it easier to deal with the new Chinese limits than others.

Countries like the Netherlands, which segregates all of its waste into separate streams, have been relatively unaffected. “The quality of collection in the Netherlands is very good and we can sell it very well,” said Hans van de Nes, director of Dutch waste management company Sortiva.

Most EU countries collect plastic with metal, which helps reducing collection costs and maintains relatively high quality, but the U.K., Ireland, Greece, Romania and Malta allow a mix of metal, plastics, glass, cardboard and paper in the same bag. That produces low-quality waste that is difficult to sell.

Ireland, the highest per capita producer of plastic waste, depended on China to deal with 95 percent of its plastic waste and is now coping with a waste crisis, according to local reports.

source: https://www.politico.eu/article/eur...-forces-europe-to-confront-its-waste-problem/