Plastic Ban: The Last Straw

Perspective / Plastic Ban

- Sunita Narain

We must know what we W are up against-how immense the challenge before us is as we look at India's ban on single-use plastic that kicked in on July 1. Anyone who has been to a beach and has received a message in a bottle knows it's a stark one. The bottle is made of plastic. So is the water-almost. That's the message. The bottle may seem tiny compared to the vast sea, but have you heard of trash vortexes? The largest one, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is estimated to have an area of 1.6 million sq. km-a floating bridge of semi-dissolved trash between California and Japan. We have one of our own, in the Indian Ocean, toxifying the blue waters between South Africa and Australia. Scientists have called it a thin plastic soup.

First things first. The ban is a small step-indeed, too small-but a critical step forward for India. Even in its limited form, the ban can at least get us thinking...and moving. It seeks to list out and proscribe items of daily use that we use just once and then discard. It's a woefully incomplete list, but for starters we have those flimsy plastic cups you get at roadside kiosks, straws you never think twice about throwing after you finish your cool drink-and yes, those omnipresent carry bags, anything less than 120-micron thickness, by December 2022. Out of our hands, they stay omnipresent, flying around our streets like ghosts, leaching into the soil at landfills, or choking our drains, eventually being washed out via our rivers into the seas-poisoning everything they touch. The Ganga ranks No. 6 in the world as a disposer of plastic into the seas. The Indus is No. 2. Out in the sea, they often find decades-old toothbrushes, but most of the plastic doesn't retain its shape: it gets broken down into its constituent polymers. This is the 'plastic soup' that gets into fish, into you, into everything.