Ideas for relieving our plastic problem
Re One-time-use plastics threaten the environment, and our health, Editorial, April 29
These single-use plastics should have been dealt with ages ago, but politicians love to study this issue relentlessly before concluding what everyone already knows.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, study is no longer needed. Step up to the plate and ban the likes of plastic bottles, plastic straws and plastic cotton swabs today. Microplastics are now showing up in our bottled water as well as in the Arctic sea ice in large volumes. Let’s get moving on this anti-plastic “sea change” before it is permanent. Greg Prince, Toronto The Toronto Star’s call to limit single-use plastic is better late than never. I would have liked to see a list of suggestions and solutions besides stopping the use of plastic straws. I would like to suggest the following for debate before we all drown in our own waste.
Plastic is made from oil, so it should be given a clear price per pound as an energy source to be burned for hydro. People would collect it for the cash value.
It might be time to put a cash deposit on all plastic containers — and all means all. Glass is a wonderful natural product that is completely benign. If beer companies can collect and refill glass bottles and make a nice profit, many others can do the same. Think of the jobs that will come back to us.
We used to talk about heating plastic into solid lumps and grinding it up to mix into asphalt. A product that is itself recyclable over and over.
A good school project would be collecting plastic trash from 450 metres of any road in the province and do an audit of the companies selling the litter. Do you think most of it would be from fast food drive-thrus? Sounds like a good excuse for a drive-thru tax or litter tax. The revenue can be used to hire students to pick up trash in the summer.
The only thing required would be politicians who want to do the right thing rather the politically expedient thing. Do they still exist? Kurt Crist, Consecon, Ont.