2. Environmental Stewardship is Everyones Responsibility
Expandable Polystyrene (EPS) products are designed to be disposable
and, therefore, have a useful life of only minutes or hours. Yet,
it takes several decades to hundreds of years for EPS to
deteriorate in the environment or landfill. The EPA (United States
Environmental Protection Agency) claims that the foam coffee cups
so many of us use daily will still be sitting in landfills five
hundred years from now.
3. The next 20 generations will see your morning EPS coffee cup . .
.
4. it floats on water 5. is easily blown by the wind from place
to place even when disposed of properly. 6. it merely breaks down
into smaller pieces that litter the landscape. 7. is a major
component in the overall make up of beach and marine debris 8.
marine and land wildlife often perish as a result of ingesting EPS
products mistaken as food. Plastics kill more than 1 million
seabirds, 100,000
marine mammals, and even more fish in the North Pacific alone,
every year
9. EPS is non-biodegradable (unable to decay into constituent substances) 10. Because of the physical nature of EPS(i.e., floatability, breakability, large surface area), scientists are beginning to speculate about the role of EPS waste in contributing to other persistent non-visible water pollution problems, such as bacterial indicators. 11. There is currently no meaningful recycling of food service EPS products, due in part to contamination from food residue.