Drinking straws are pointless and damaging, but it’s hard to leave them behind
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By Bee Wilson
Plastic drinking straws, I realized recently, are enmeshed with many of my fondest memories. When I was a child, a glass of lemonade with a straw was heaven. Drinking straws were also part of going to the movies, huddled in the dark with a giant, icy Diet Coke. In my 20s, I remember the thrill of sipping whiskey sours through one of those short, slender cocktail straws and feeling carefree and sophisticated.
Nestlé today announced its ambition to make 100% of its packaging recyclable or re-usable by 2025. Its vision is that none of its packaging, including plastics, ends up in landfill or as litter. Nestlé believes that there is an urgent need to minimize the impact of packaging on the environment.
Rusty Pelican introduces initiative to reduce single use disposable plastic
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The #MiamiIsNotPlastic campaign – a joint effort between Key Biscayne Florida’s iconic waterfront restaurant Rusty Pelican, its neighboring sister restaurant Whisky Joe’s, and the Rickenbacker Marina – officially kicked off in January 2018. Conceived by Pallava Goenka, Regional Managing Director of Specialty Restaurants Corporation (SRC) which operates Rusty Pelican and Whisky Joe’s, in partnership with the Rickenbacker Marina, the initiative, which draws attention to plastic pollution caused by single use plastic, has drawn the interest o
Lack of loading dock space in which to stage and process materials is a common problem when developing a hospital recycling program. HPRC has developed a complete toolkit of dock space guidance. From mapping material workflow to the 5S workplace organization method, the HPRC dock space gudance blog has very useful advice to help your hospital recycling program.
A number of disposal options are available to healthcare facilities to deal with the non-regulated mixed plastic waste they generate. To help healthcare facilities make a more informed choice, HPRC undertook a life cycle assessment (LCA) literature survey on the environmental impacts of various plastics disposal methods. HPRC’s approach to the survey and its results are described in the HPRC website.
You may have seen a few campaigns on social media recently about major corporations like Bacardi pledging to eliminate straws from all company functions as well as campaigns from numerous groups like #stopsucking. The initiatives behind these campaigns are to get people to eliminate the use of straws in their daily routine. Why?
It’s bad. Bad for the environment, but even worse for you.
Because increasing healthcare plastics means considering all parts of the value chain, HPRC has developed a guidance document for manufacturers that articulates design considerations which enhance the recycling potential and value of the final product or packaging. This guide is intended for product designers and users of disposable medical devices and will enable increased design and use for recyclability. The guidelines may also be of use for waste haulers and recyclers interested in recycling this waste stream.
Many people living in Pacific nations, like Vanuatu, Indonesia, and the Philippines, struggle to find adequate shelter, a challenge compounded by the elevated risk of structure-destroying cyclones. Meanwhile, miles off their coasts, plastic waste floats in the ocean, contaminating the marine food chain and threatening the world's largest ecosystem.
Can you think of two everyday materials with a worse environmental rep than Styrofoam and plastic bottles? From production through disposal, these things produce toxic gasses, are major culprits in our single-use disposable culture, and are rapidly invading our oceans and destroying marine food chains. This week’s guests on Sea Change Radio are each working on eco-friendly alternatives to these environmental villains.
The average American generates between 88 and 120 pounds of plastic waste per year. Imagine what it would mean for you to cut that down almost entirely. What lifestyle changes would you have to make? This week’s guest on Sea Change Radio asked herself that same question and then tried to answer it – embarking on a mission to reduce her plastic use as much as possible and tell the world how she did it.
