Plastic ban won’t work without effective substitutes

The Union Government’s ban on single-use plastic (SUP) products enforced from July 1 is a step in the right direction. The Government has identified 19 plastic items that are not very useful but have a high potential to become litter.

The ban makes it illegal to produce, import, stock, distribute, buy or sell them. These include cutlery items such as plates, cups, glasses, forks, spoons, knives, trays, etc.

Other products that come under the ban are balloon sticks, ear-buds, cigarette packs, straws, stirrers, PVC banners, sweet boxes, packaging films, candy and ice cream sticks, invitation cards, polystyrene used for decoration, and PVC banners measuring under 100 microns.

Several other products such as bottle for beverages, bags for chips do not come under the ambit of banned items, but the manufacturers will be liable to ensure certain parameters in matters of their thickness in order to ease their recycling.

Plastic waste constitutes a serious threat to the environment as it does not decay, turns into microorganisms and gets into the food chain thereby turning a health hazard. The ban is pursuant to a notification by the Union Ministry of Forests, Environment and Climate Change (FoECC) issued in August last year. It is likely to result in closure of a large number of enterprises in the micro, small and medium (MSME) sector which are engaged in manufacturing these products employing two lakh people directly and over four lakh individuals indirectly.

The industry is worth Rs. 10,000 crore. Though the industry has pleaded for deferring of the ban, Union Minister Bhupendra Yadav has rejected the plea referring to sufficient notice period. The ban has to be viewed in the context of India’s commitment to cut down the intensity of emissions by 45% by 2030 in keeping with pledges made at the COP26 last year.

The plastic product manufacturing units make over 243,000 metric tons of disposable plastic items each year in India. Given the fact that India figures at the top of 100 nations that generate single-use plastic waste, some urgent and stringent measures were essential.

Recent studies have identified over 8,000 chemical additives that go into plastic processing for a diverse range of products and some of them are a thousand times more potent as greenhouses gases than carbon dioxide.

Most of the plastic products that are discarded as waste end up in waste-to-energy plants as selling it to them fetches four times more revenue than selling it as just recyclable scrap. Cement kilns covet them for their high calorific value.

But similar are the resulting emissions from such industries. The Ministry has minutely scrutinized the alternatives available before banning such products. Bamboo spoons, plantain trays, wooden ice-cream cups and palm leaf plates were identified as substitutes for the items being banned.

Not merely this, plastic being non-biodegradable, unsafely disposed plastic waste is identified as the major factor in choking waterways and sewerage in urban areas leading to flooding. Much of the success in banishing plastic products would depend upon effective implementation of the ban and popularizing the sustainable alternatives and ensuring their availability.