"Chris Hogg" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 2 Jan 2018 00:19:10 -0800 (PST), harry
wrote:

S'obvious what the next move's gonna be.
They're gonna demand (more) money to take our plastic waste.
And have the option of refusing it if it's contaminated.

There's a big fuss ATM about plastics getting into the oceans and
harming sea life, from plankton to whales.

It's not just the ocean

I have recently holidayed in one of the less well developed countries (but
nowhere near to complete deprivation) and every piece of rough ground is
covered in waste plastic

People in the UK are
talking about reducing use of plastics in packaging etc. and some
places are even rejoicing in declaring themselves 'plastic free', or
whatever. How silly is all that?

Seems perfectly sensible to be (from the pov that you are asking)

Apart from the fact that plastics,
especially plastic packaging, is an extremely useful and hygienic way
of presenting food etc,

This isn't a reason to pollute the environment with tonnes of waste that
doesn't biodegrade. Find some other way of packaging your goods!

I read that 90% of the plastic waste in our
oceans comes from rivers in the Far East. http://bit.ly/2lC2qGR

If we hadn't "invented" the stuff they would be using it either

AIUI, in the UK, plastic waste is either recycled, incinerated or sent
to landfill.

great we send it to land fill. For it to sit there forever.

How much of it actually ends up in the sea?

the percenetahe that doesn't get put in the reuse collection in the first
place

look around your local town you will see discarded plastic "everywhere"

I've no idea
but not much, I wouldn't think.

But if we didn't create this packaging in the first place there would be
none.

So it seems to me that these campaigns
to reduce plastic packaging in the UK are typically misguided,
emotional, not thought through and probably 'green' ideas.

seems more than sensible to me.

What I don't know is what happens to the plastic waste that gets
recycled. Clearly, from recent headlines about China not taking any
more of the stuff, a lot was actually exported and not recycled in the
UK. Which raises the question 'what happens to the exported stuff?' Is
a lot of it just dumped in the sea in the Far East, in which case
there is cause for concern, but it just means we should up our game
when it comes to recycling here in the UK, not blindly run campaigns
to reduce the use of plastics all together.

I think it's irrelevant that it only gets to pollute the environment because
somebody hasn't disposed of it properly

The point is that we have proved that we CANNOT control the disposal and no
matter what we do some (non negligible amount) of it will end up polluting
the environment

Many of the uses of plastic containers (I'll admit not all) don't need to be
plastic at all

We should find another way

tim