Someone Else's Problem

Waste and labour in urban South Asia

- ANKUSH PAL

THE PROLOGUE to Saabira Chaudhuri's Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic opens with a ludicrous image: a massive orange barge carrying over three thousand tonnes of garbage sailed from the United States to Belize and back in 1987, desperately seeking a place to unload. Earlier that year, a “hapless entrepreneur” had heard of the possibility of making big money if methane from garbage could be turned into energy, and a mafia leader was willing to pay him for trash to be dumped in other states, given that New York was running out of landfill space. But this was far more complex than it sounded, as officials of various states and countries, including Mexico and the Bahamas, did not want to touch it with the proverbial bargepole. Months later, after Congressional hearings and immense news coverage, the Mobro 4000 had “turned into an international symbol of America’s garbage crisis.”

At the time, Chaudhuri writes, the US was producing nearly 230 million tonnes of garbage a year, with packaging forming a significant part of this. It continues to be the largest per capita creator of plastic waste, besides being known for exporting its used plastic. The book uses the anecdote about the ship as a hook to examine a salient question today: what do we do with plastic being thrown away in ever bigger numbers? “Globally, the equivalent of one truck of plastic waste ends up in the ocean every minute,” she writes. “Plastic comprises between 70 and 80 per cent of the litter that ends up in marine environments.” With a second chapter focussed on the story of shampoo brands and their promotion of sachets—in 2021, almost 41 billion shampoo packages were sold in India, of which 99 percent were sachets—Chaudhuri examines the prolific rise of single-use plastic in India and the millions of dollars that brands such as Unilever have put into getting their consumers dependent on disposable products.