No single-use plastic

There is no case for extending the deadline

The long-pending ban on single-use plastic seems set to come into effect on July 1. But intense lobbying is still underway by some stakeholders to get the deadline extended further on the clichéd, but hard to justify, plea of non-availability of their cost-effective alternatives. The most vocal among these lobbyists are the producers of beverages where straws are integral to their products. They are seeking time, a year or six months, to organise the supplies of straws made of biodegradable material to replace the plastic ones. Environmentalists, expectedly, discount this plea, arguing that ample time has been given to them to find the appropriate substitutes for plastic straws.

The phasing out of these straws and other use-and-throw plastic products was initially notified by the Central Pollution Control Board way back in 2018, fixing 2020 as the deadline for doing so. The government’s resolve to rid the country of these environmentally unfriendly products was reiterated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his Independence Day address in 2019. The present deadline of July 1, 2022, was set almost a year ago in August 2021. There has, therefore, been no dearth of time for these companies to switch to the new norms. Compostable straws made of paper, PLA (poly-lactic acid), or cornstarch, which are now being commonly used in many other countries, can be produced or imported for use in India. In fact, some companies have already started doing so. Though the indigenous manufacturing capacity for such straws is still low compared to the requirement, it can be expected to expand as the demand builds up.

The environmental and health hazards posed by plastic items having limited utility but enormous littering potential are grave enough to rule out any laxity on remedial action. Nearly 90 per cent of single-use plastic material is neither recycled nor disposed of properly. The bulk of it ends up either on roads, creating traffic hassles and clogging the drainage systems to cause water-logging, or in the waterways, reaching right up to the seas to affect aquatic ecosystems. A sizable part of it lands up in garbage dumps, where it can stay for hundreds of years, emitting toxic fumes to pollute the air. Traces of plastic toxicants are often found even in cooked or processed foods packed in substandard plastic containers.

India’s annual per capita plastic waste generation, estimated at about 4 kg, may seem low compared to that of many other countries, but in terms of the total mass, it ranks third in the world, next only to China and the US. More worrisome is want of an effective system to segregate plastic waste from the rest of the garbage and dispose it of scientifically without sullying the environment. As many as about 170 countries, which participated in the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi in March last, pledged to do away with hazardous plastic by 2030. In fact, about 80 of them have carried out their commitments by imposing a complete or partial ban on the production, trade, possession, and use of plastic material not conforming to the prescribed standards. About 30 of them are small and developing countries of Africa and Asia. There is no reason why India should lag behind.