I was sitting in my car when I saw an empty bottle of Thumbs Up being flung out of the taxi in front of me. I wish I had been like one of those people you hear about, the kinds that get out of their vehicles and admonish the person littering the road. “Please pick up the bottle, sir,” I would have said. “How can you litter and call yourself educated? It’s up to us to keep our country clean.”
Instead, I sat mulling in my seat. What would the person have done with the bottle if they hadn’t tossed it from the car? It would probably keep sitting there until someone noticed it. And then? It would be chucked into a bin, discarded as garbage. Plastic bottles are recyclable, so it would get segregated during waste collection. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the process of plastic waste collection and recycling well enough to continue my chain of thought.
I went home and did some reading. The only thing I understood with utmost clarity was the fact that plastic waste management, collection, and recycling is a process steeped in nationwide ambiguity. The Plastic Waste Management Rules of 2016 state that segregated plastic should be handed over to registered waste-pickers. But in India, waste collection includes a large informal sector. The majority of the people that pick our waste aren’t registered, rendering the whole recycling process itself illegal.
Further, every state has its own local bodies and rules that attempt to take care of plastic pollution. The recycling chain is often confusing and complicated, where formal and informal waste collection falls on the shoulders of private individuals and bodies rather than the government or the established system.
This makes me more certain than ever that the responsibility of plastic consumption and disposal is solely ours. It is up to you, up to me, to reduce the pollution of plastic. The government must, of course, implement and clarify their plastic and recycling laws, but in the meanwhile, the least we can do is become more aware of how the whole process works. Or does not work.
Currently, I feel that nobody knows what happens to plastic after it is used, neither the manufacturers, nor the consumers.
Top beverage companies, like Bisleri and Coca-Cola, print buy-back values on their PET plastic bottles. But inter-state buying and selling of these bottles is prohibited, and there is a lack of clarity on whether citizens can return bottles to the retailers or to the collection centers. Single-use plastics have been banned before in various states like Maharashtra, but implementing this saw hurdles so large that the ban was revoked.
The fact of the matter is this: plastic is non-biodegradable. Plastic, once made, never leaves the face of this Earth. It is as simple as that. With so much ambiguity surrounding plastic recycling, the only option is to reduce the demand for plastic itself. Plastic is so commonly used because it is so durable, and so cheap. Compared to materials like paper and cloth, plastic triumphs, almost in every household and supermarket. Therefore, it falls on each of us to reduce our consumption of plastic. Easy solutions are to carry our own cloth bags while buying groceries, or carrying metallic cups and straws, instead of buying plastic ones for beverages.
I understand that however much we may wish otherwise, plastic cannot be completely eradicated. But we should remember something as a rule of thumb: if we buy plastic, we must reuse it. Apart from diminishing the use of plastic itself, the one thing we can do is prevent plastic items from landing up in the garbage at all. The guy in the car could have reused that Thumbs-Up bottle as a water bottle in the future. With the awareness I now have, at least I sure will.
By Arnav Bhatia