Go beyond supply curbs to squeeze plastic waste
PremiumIndia’s ban on disposable plastic items is slated to take effect on Friday, but their appeal on counts of cost and convenience is so strong that we’ll need to work on demand reduction too
It is hard to imagine today, but four or five decades ago, plastic was touted as an eco-friendly option. Paper bags and wooden chairs meant the guilt of pulped flora and axed trees, while polythene carry-bags and polypropylene furniture were presented as markers of modern life, with their inputs derived from oil. What that synthetic push failed to foresee was its large-scale invasion of our lives. Worse, as with nuclear power, little attention was paid to waste disposal, with the result that we now have entire ecosystems at threat of being choked by materials that refuse to blend back into nature. Ecologists warn of marine species killed by microplastics and much other ruination if there’s no let up in the vast volumes of use-and-throw plastic we routinely disfigure our planet with. The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) places annual plastic output at around 400 million tonnes per year; of all that has ever been made, just about 12% was burnt and only 9% recycled. By another estimate, over 300 million tonnes is cast away as garbage every year, with India among the top three generators of plastic waste, along with China and the US.
Our ban on disposable plastic is scheduled to kick in on 1 July, with India’s Central Pollution Control Board set to prohibit the manufacture, import, stocking, distribution and sale of single-use items that use a class of inputs infamous for not being biodegradable. A notification of this was issued by the Centre last August, but the abundance of plastic being used and strewn all around us suggests such a slow wean-off that a jerky shift is now inevitable. Some makers of low-cost Tetrapak beverages even sought a reprieve on the plea that paper straws were too expensive. Since cost efficiency was never the point of the switch, such strawman petitions are easy to dismiss. The very success of plastic is based on its cheapness, thanks to economies of scale granted by industrial units that use hydrocarbon feedstock to produce sundry polymers. Given the magnitude of installed capacity we have, few other products are quite so inexpensive—or convenient. This also explains the emphasis on recycling. Without a substitute, plastic cannot fully be phased out.
The reality of plastic’s appeal should alert us to the worry of our ban proving leaky. Stuff that is cheap and useful can be ‘addictive’ in terms of market behaviour. So, unless our supply curbs go hand-in-hand with demand compressors, incentives to skirt the rules will persist, which may adversely affect outcomes. In a country with a sizeable informal sector and patchy record on compliance, a squeeze at only one end may not suffice. What we’ll need is a broad attitudinal shift to play a major role. For this, we must mount a campaign that reaches out far and wide, aimed at subjecting the use of plastic disposables to social reproach at every level. Globally, the UNEP has thrown its weight behind “Plastic is forever", a slogan that plays on an ad-line deployed to promote diamonds. While this is catchy enough to focus minds on how long it takes for plastic to decompose among people who are somewhat aware of the problem, it is unlikely to get far in India without adequate exposition of the issues at stake. Our local initiatives so far have included events like a “hackathon" held last summer, when plastic carry bags of under 50 micron thickness were banned, to get us talking about the ills of poly waste. Little, though, has materially changed over the year. Supply-side action was necessary, but let’s not rely on a crackdown alone.
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