World News

While I was reading it I felt the idea that baking under the sun in a landfill could have a similar effect? Sure, that's not their "intended" use but also looking around extremely trash-filled areas, there is definitely trash baking under the sun in small puddles so they aren't really being used as intended in the first place.

Just around my old home in a country where trash isn't piled up everywhere to the point where it's a community effort to solve, I saw plenty of styrofoam and wax lined paper cups sitting in the same conditions - damp, wet, and baking. Frankly, it seems weird to say it's only sensationalism when there are around 600 billion paper/plastic cups made a year and there's no possible way that 100% of them are being disposed of "how they are intended to be used".

While I don't think it's the most important thing ever we should focus on, it should be important to mitigate issues like this when we come across them and there's nothing wrong with raising awareness. At the moment, there are actually hundreds of thousands of these types of products in water and landfills. Whether that's how they were meant to be or not, if conditions can cause them to break down this way then somewhere along the way it is going to happen because we just can't properly dispose of 100% of anything.