How many of us actually re-use plastics? If you go to buy grocceries the last thing you would want to be carrying around is a bunch of creased old plastic bags, all in the name of RE-USING. We would rather buy new plastic bags everytime we go and buy items at the shop, and we most proberbly keep those plastic bags untill they pile up in the drawer and eventually we throw them away, hoping that they will get recycled. Question is, why keep them in the first place? Guilt concious gets the best of us sometimes, and we feel like we can find good use of these plastic bags-eventually, but in most cases we really don"t. In rural areas things work rather differently though. Firstly the municipality doesn"t collect rubbish from households, so burning all waste is the only alternative there is, recyclable or not-we just burn them:). So I would say recycling happens on a very small scale in rural areas, and if you consider all the rural areas there are in South Africa, it"s safe to say that there"s not enough recycling happening as its sappose to be.
Lastly, I found out that processing used plastics often costs more than virgin plastics, so PET recyclers can"t compete with the virgin resin flooding the market, unless we turn tables:)
Just thoughts..and I"m signing out:):)
Aboh
A very good article indeed and as an aspiring environmentalist, it would be best to the rural areas you are acquainted with to engage your knowledge with. Perhaps share some ideas with concerned municipalities to help reduce the biomass and pollution in such areas.
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