The other day, when I was buying vegetables from an itinerant vendor, he started to sort out my purchases into different plastic bags. “Don’t give me plastic bags,” I said, producing a cloth tote. The vendor stared at me: “most of my customers insist on plastic bags these days,” he said, “I have to source mine from Shahadra, a long way from where I live in Gurgaon!” Days ago, the Delhi government had announced the closure of all plastic bag manufacturing units in the capital, in a bid to curb their use and to reduce the mountains of waste in the city landfills. I asked him if he’d heard about the ban. He hadn’t, and was amazed that the government would consider such a thing: “If the government bans plastic bags, how will my customers carry the vegetables they buy from me?” Would it be difficult, I asked, for him to switch to newspaper bags? “Have you seen how easily they tear? And imagine what will happen when I put all these damp vegetables in them …” he said.
I showed him the MCD rubbish dump outside the colony and tried to explain how garbage from the homes of people like us rotted forever in landfills locked inside non-degradable plastic bags. “Your children, and possibly their children after them, will also be dealing with this same mountain of waste if we don’t do anything about it now,” I said earnestly. He was unconvinced. “There must be some way for the government to deal with all this! Why should people like me suffer? If they ban plastic bags, what will happen to vendors like me?” he wanted to know.
There was no way, he opined, that the government could actually ban plastic bag manufacture. Although flouting the ban (under Section 5 of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986) is actionable with imprisonment up to five years and fine up to Rs 100,000 or both — the vegetable vendor said that so far, the market seemed to be thriving. “I buy my bags really cheap from unlisted small scale manufacturers who literally make them in sheds inside their houses… I don’t think that even if the ban is enforced, they’ll be affected…” he said. When for the nth time, he asked me if I was sure the ban was actually in place, he moodily filled my cotton tote with the veggies I’d bought, and said, “I hope the government is planning to rehabilitate all those bag manufacturers who’ve been working hard to make an honest living…”
Later, I was chatting with Asha Arora, a supporter of the campaign against the Okhla-Timarpur waste-to-energy incinerator project. “There’s no good way to get rid of plastic bags in landfills — they don’t degrade naturally, and burning them sends up hundreds of toxins into the air we breathe. When these plastics are incinerated in the plant that Jindal Ecopolis is building in Okhla, the entire city is going to suffer the ill effects,” she said. The only way to reduce the growing mountains of waste was to cut down the use of non-degradable plastics, she opined: “We need to go back to the good old cloth bags,” she said, “or vegetable vendors could start selling cheap cloth bags along with veggies!”
I took out my stylish cloth tote made by Small Steps, a Pondicherry-based NGO, which could fold neatly to fit inside my handbag. Instead of asking vegetable vendors to carry environment-friendly bags, maybe the solution lay in people like us switching from plastic to cloth. There’s an old Hindi adage that it takes lots of drops of water to fill a pot to the brim. Hopefully, the opposite will hold true as well…
