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The European Commission has proposed new rules to ban certain plastic products in order to reduce the waste filling our oceans, it announced Monday.
The EU's measures tackle the top 10 plastic products that wash up on Europe's beaches and fill its seas, including a ban on the private use of single-use plastics like plastic straws, plates and utensils and containers used for fast food or your daily takeaway coffee.
The measures would also have each country in the EU come up with a system that would collect 90 percent of plastic bottles by 2025.
"The proposed ban in the European Union of single use plastics, notably plastic straws and cotton buds, is welcome and very promising news," said Dr. Paul Harvey from Macquarie University in a press release. "Single use plastic pollution is one of the biggest environmental catastrophes of this generation."
You can see why the EU is making the proposal. Single-use plastic objects and fishing gear account for 70 percent of waste in the ocean, according to the EU. In 2017, researchers found 38 million pieces of plastic waste on an uninhabited South Pacific island. Figures from the same year showed that a million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute, a number predicted to jump 20 percent by 2021.
Fortunately, others are tackling the plastic problem, including scientists and environmentalists who've come up with one solution involving mushrooms that can eat plastic.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday May 30 2018, @05:39PM (2 children)
Are you sure? Last time I checked, most plastic 'recycling' processes were actually downcycling: they produce a lower grade of plastic than you started with. This means that you eventually get lots of low-grade plastic that needs to be disposed of (and the cleanest way of doing that is incineration, which isn't great) and you need to keep putting oil into the system to produce the higher grades of plastic.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday May 30 2018, @06:07PM (1 child)
From what I've read, not so much. There's plenty of uses for recycled plastics; check out some YouTube videos on the processes and how they're able to produce clean plastic chips from recycled products using automated processes, which can then be used just like virgin plastic. It's quite impressive.
Even if you had a bunch of low-grade plastic, why would you need to incinerate it? If you really can't use it for park benches or plastic lumber (which are great uses for it BTW), you could just put it in a landfill where it'll just sit indefinitely. You don't need to burn it. But considering how much we use plastic for applications where high purity really isn't necessary, and how many applications could use such plastic (like again, plastic lumber), I fail to see how we would ever need to dispose of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:19AM
I was going to ask: why can't plastic be compressed into a cubic block with heat to make it solid then buried?