On the occasion of World Environment Day today, experts laid stress on having viable alternatives to plastics and argued that without it, a blanket ban on all consumer plastics was bound to fail.
They also maintained that there was a need for beating plastic pollution by establishing proper waste management and recycling ecosystem in the country.
India was the global host of this year's World Environment Day celebrations, the largest UN-led celebration on environment. The theme for this edition is 'Beat Plastic Pollution'.
The experts said that there was a lack of waste management infrastructure in rural or semi-urban areas.
In many villages or small towns, even if people within the household collect their waste in a bin, where do they dispose of that waste? We need better, more sustainable collection and management of such non-biodegradable waste, especially outside the big cities. Prohibiting single-use plastics, such as bags and straws, is a very welcome and much-needed step, said Dr Gauri Pathak, Homi Bhabha Fellow and Assistant Professor, Aarhus University, Denmark.
She said that single-use plastics and plastics in PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles or HDPE (high density polyethylene) containers, which are recyclable and free of endocrine disrupting chemicals such as BPA (Bisphenol A), need to be differentiated.
"We need to have viable, relatively easy to use alternatives to plastics in place. In the absence of viable alternatives, a blanket ban on all consumer plastics is bound to fail," she added.
Former Vice Chancellor of Rajasthan University Arun Sawant opined that even though there were viable alternatives available for plastic carry bags, plastics such as PET which were used for food and drug packaging were currently indispensable. He said that banning PET in such a scenario would only create further challenges in implementation.
The experts debated whether the use of glass bottles as an alternative to plastic bottles would solve the problem.
Glass requires higher energy during the manufacturing process as it is made from silica/sand at temperatures above 1,000 degrees Celsius. The amount of water needed for washing per case of glass bottles is approximately 20 litres, implying that close to 120 crore litres of water is used to wash 50 lakh glass bottle cases, per annum. In a state which reels under a drought-like situation almost every year, spending this huge amount of water on agriculture would be a more logical step, stressed Professor R N Jagtap, Head of Department of Polymer and Surface Engineering, Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai.
The Tamil Nadu government today announced it would ban the use of plastic items, including non-biodegradable carry bags, from January 2019 to "gift a plastic-free" state to future generations.
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