Arun Bais
Arun Bais
Nov 2 · 3 min read

Saying no to plastic, more than one bag at a time.

I once counted the number of single-use plastic packets from one trip to my local market.

500g dal – 1

Green chilies – 1

1 kg potatoes and 1 garlic bulb – 1

500g tomatoes – 1

4 Coke Zero – 1 (and 4 plastic bottles)

200g yogurt – 1 (clay cup in aplastic bag)

In one 20-minute jaunt through market, I had accumulated a dozen plastic packets. There was a plastic bag for everything and everything was in a plastic bag. And this was my local market, not a supermarket where every little things comes neatly sealed in its own plastic coffin.

Now, I try to be more mindful. I say “I don’t need that bag” as my vegetable vendor automatically reaches for a flimsy plastic bag for that one little bottle guard I have bought. I try and carry enough bags with me, but it is not easy.

We are addicted to the use -and -throw convenience of plastic. And even as the government tries to ring the warning bell on single-use plastic, our home delivery culture brings even more plastic and styrofoam to the door.

The food delivery app delivers my meal in plastic boxes, sealed in more plastic to avoid spillage, all delivered in a crackling plastic bag, though I hear some places use Naturals biodegradable cutlery and boxes now. The online retailers send everything sealed tight in cardboard, plastic, styrofoam and bubble wrap. Please rate your delivery, the friendly online retailer tell us. Hoe was the packaging ?

The county’s plastic packaging industry produced 13.4 million tones in 2015, it will grow to 22 million tones in 2020, says a federation of Indian chambers of commerce and industry study. Almost half of this is single-use plastic. It is hard to remember in the excitement of these super offer raining down on us during Diwali sales that India generates 26000 tones of plastic waste everyday – and I know I am part of it.

Of course, the government has to do its part. We can argue whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s exhortation to phase out single-use plastic by 2020 rather than a ban , was a cop-out. Our cows are still choking plastic. Micro plastic is in our food. The drains get clogged with plastic. And my kawadi-wala who buys old newspaper and bottles, sits admits mountains of plastic bottles. I feel pious about recycling though I know that even recyclable plastic can only recycled seven-nine times before it ends up in the landfill.

But I daresay that something is shifting finally within us. This year on various occasion during festival, I saw booths with young men and women talking to the milling crowds about avoiding single-use plastic. Plastic free Durga Puja and Dushera was not something I had ever heard before. There was still an awful lot of plastic floating around but there was also glimmer of a consciousness I hadn’t seen before. I heard of one Durga Puja used 500000 plastic bottles to decorated the pandal and drive home the message of plastic waste, though I don’t know what happened to the bottles afterwards. The no-plastic theme continued into Diwali.

The Delhi Municipal corporation estimates the city generate 4000 metric tones of waste on regular day and this almost doubles during festivals.

It is easy to feel helpless when it comes to global warming while being stricken by climate anxiety. We don’t think anything we can do can stop the glacier from melting. But plastic is a different matter.

We can be the change we want to see – or at least the beginning of that change.

Arun Bais

Written by

Arun Bais

Marketing Analytic •Part Time Blogger • Mega-Film Geek • Newsy • Simplicity seeker • Radical Thinker with opinion on everything •