Is it possible to live a life without plastic?
With
the Diwali haze turning our air poisonous, a reporter goes on a quest
to find out the challenges of living an eco-friendly urban life
Until
quite recently, a minimum of 40 plastic carry bags would enter my house
every single week as a result of grocery shopping alone. I would say a
more honest assessment for some weeks would be about 70. The math is
simple: On an average, at least 160 such bags in a month, and more than
2,000 in a year, which then served no other purpose than to occasionally
function as garbage bags. Of course, we also had a supply of black
garbage bags.
All of these would eventually find their way into a landfill, most
likely the very spot that is Delhi’s most shameful: a massive landfill
that’s become a large hill at the gateway to the city from the north,
birds of prey circling it at all times of the day, and alongside which
is the city’s largest wholesale market, the Azadpur mandi, which supplies a large part of the fruits and vegetables that we eat. We got home these carry bags even if, on the majority of occasions we went to the neighbourhood stores, a large shopping bag would be slung across the shoulder. The instinct of the good shopkeeper’s assistant is to speedily pack the goods inside the plastic bag while we’re paying up. And our instinct is to stuff the bag inside our own, with each additional bag neatly demarcating our purchases, and even keeping our precious cloth bag clean from the wetness and messiness of vegetables, if that’s what we were buying.
Is it possible to live a life without plastic?
If, with some effort, we manage to do away with the convenience of these carry bags, there are the packaged goods that we are confronted with—in food alone, there is, for instance, our rice, dal, biscuits, oil, spices or milk. The type of packaging they come in matters; at a subconscious level, we have come to identify this with the quality of the product, and known brands have the upper hand here.
However, reports over recent years from the laboratory of the Centre for Science and Environment, a New Delhi-based non-profit, alone have suggested how very wrong this perception may be. While pesticides were found in well-known brands of honey and soft drinks, the factory-made brands of bread that are a daily purchase in a majority of Indian households, including mine, as well as those used in many popular pizza and burger chains, revealed traces of the chemicals potassium iodate and potassium bromate, both serious health hazards with carcinogenic properties that are banned in many countries.
Let’s put all these numbers and percentages that your eyes glazed over in perspective. Since a large volume of plastic waste leaks into the ocean every year, the World Economic Forum has calculated that by 2050—which is not a long way off—there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.
Disgusted already?
***
For
a few years now, scientists have been raging over a matter of
nomenclature: on whether to call the times we live in the Anthropocene
epoch. This literally means that the activities of human beings have had
a significant and permanent negative impact on Earth’s environment and
climate. It is a remarkably sobering thought that a single species could
have done so much damage.
While
some scientists may argue over the kind of precise evidence required to
announce a new geological era, the fact remains that the arrogance with
which we live, unmindful of other lives on this planet, is evident
everywhere. How frequently do we now read of animals venturing out of
the dwindling forest spaces on to our (a necessary accentuation
in our brain) roads? Of species being choked into extinction? And the
unpredictability of our climate is now so stark as to be the topic of
conversation even in urban drawing rooms. With India responsible for a
4.1% share of global emissions, one can only hope that its ratification
of the Paris Agreement on climate change, just weeks before the 22nd
round of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is
set to take place in Marrekech, Morrocco, from 7-18 November, will lead
to a sincere effort to fulfil its commitments towards its environment
goals.
For the past couple of years, my family has often spoken of
quitting Delhi, which holds the disreputable title of being one of the
top 10 polluted cities in the world. With the monsoon receding and the
return of a permanent haze of smog over the city, this thought once
again flexes its muscle. But if we were to run, where would we run to?
If not the permanently damaged lungs that cough their protest, would not
the pesticide-ridden food continue to trouble us?As we rush unconcerned towards what seems like self-wrought doom, is there nothing we can do?
***
He’s correct, of course. And, as he points out, we no longer have the luxury of time.
However, it’s also a fact that the problems have come too close to home. However far removed concepts like Anthropocene or melting glaciers may seem, it’s impossible for any one of us to turn away from this toxic mess of our own making, affecting every aspect of our lives, from the food we eat to the air we breathe. Last winter, even as designer air masks started emerging in the Delhi market, a notification from my children’s school left me aghast. It recommended that we take the precaution of sending the children to school wearing air masks. I don’t know whether I was more horrified at this apparent panic on the part of the school authorities or the conditions that had led to it. What was this sci-fi existence? When it is the children at risk, naturally you agonize more.
***
I set myself the challenge of attempting to live in a way that would cause the least hurt to the environment. But considering the scale of the problem, this is an overwhelming question to consider. Did I even have the time among all the many things I was already juggling? Didn’t I need the support of my family too? Would I now need to expend energy trying to convince them? Organic food, LED bulbs, compost bins, menstrual cups—all these things that might bring a “difference” would make an immediate dent in my budget. In a city like Delhi that is so unsafe for women, walking the streets or using certain forms of public transport past a certain hour would only make me uneasy. In any case, would I make any difference at all? Where do I even begin?
But as I realized over just a few weeks, the mere act of being alert to my every action highlighted so many that are easily reversible. It is a process that can surprise you. Once you start, you begin to question every single thing—from the toothpaste with the antibacterial agent triclosan that you’re spitting down the drain and which is toxic to marine life, to the coffee in every disposable cup that you drink at your workspace. The volumes of paper towels that I use to dry my hand in the washroom—wouldn’t the air drier that nobody uses, or better still, a handkerchief brought from home, be better? Discarding the plastic stirrer used to dissolve sugar into my coffee or the thermocol plates to eat in, reducing the sheer wastage of paper used for printing, travelling with a bottle of water in order to avoid purchases of PET bottles, making my own reetha shampoo—all these were achievable fairly easily and without much fuss.
***There are several websites that I went to with quizzes that tell you the extent of your carbon footprint and how to reduce it. Some gave solutions from the simple and doable to the truly complicated. I laughed at the concept of eating local—the most local I could get, in my very neighbourhood in fact, were the crops grown on the Yamuna river’s toxic floodplains. I patted myself on the back for having started the move to LED bulbs; being the tyrant at my home, pouncing at all electricity switches that needed to be turned off; being a habitual bucket-bath person rather than a wasteful shower one; for having slowly started replacing all plastic dabbas in the kitchen with steel, glass and ceramic; for making the daily commute on the Metro rather than a private vehicle; or for even having already started to segregate waste at home. At the same time, I flinched at reports of the environmental impact of the meat we eat, but couldn’t bring myself to think of a diet free from it; or the diesel vehicle we have at home—and thankfully the unmanageable traffic situation has ensured that it stays parked most of the time—that we couldn’t afford to change at the moment.
My generation grew up with parents who lived a more sustainable life, if only because the choices so headily offered by our post-liberalized marketplace simply did not exist then. If I don’t know how to segregate my waste—the organic wet, the paper and plastic waste that can be recycled if kept dry, batteries and broken tubelights that make up toxic waste, and the non-recyclables like sanitary napkins and diapers that go into landfills—it’s because I have never seen anyone do it. Does anyone even know that according to government rules it is mandatory for every household and every office to segregate their waste? Or that brands and manufacturers of plastic packaging are obliged to set up a system take them back from consumers? I most certainly didn’t.
Deepak Sethi, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Pom Pom Recycling Pvt. Ltd, a waste management service in Delhi that buys your dry waste and sends it to authorized recycling plants, believes that the most important challenge where waste management is concerned is to create a behavioural change. From making it compulsory education in every class at school, to enforcing it strictly in each office so that employees start getting habituated to it and can replicate the example at their homes, from making an example of it at every government office that invites vast volumes of visitors, to creating a standardized design for different bins for different categories of waste that people would start identifying with—Sethi believes that every person needs to learn, and to be taught, to manage their waste by themselves. Pom Pom itself conducts frequent awareness workshops in schools.
Garden Estate, a residential society in Gurgaon, near Delhi, says it has reduced 55% of the waste (225kg per day) that was going into landfills by the simple act of introducing a community composting project. Keshav Chander Jaini, the resident who introduced the idea in the society, says that since February, when the composting began, they have managed to sell 3,000kg of compost. This has been picked up by Edible Routes, a consultancy service that guides people on growing organic vegetables in their own space, whether it’s a balcony, terrace or farm. While 20% of the waste from the society is now going into landfills, Jaini says they hope to take steps to reduce it further to 10%, besides taking the initiative to deal separately with e-waste, empower waste pickers, and other aspects.
The Garden Estate story is important. After all, as Poonam Bir Kasturi, founder of PBK Waste Solutions Pvt. Ltd, which runs Daily Dump, states, “This is the crisis of our times.” It’s a small initiative in a gated colony that shows it’s not impossible for India to replicate the example set by Austria in becoming a zero-landfill country.
How much have I achieved in this past month? Very, very little, I’m afraid. So much of my time has been spent battling excuses, struggling with my inhibitions. And yet, I know that I haven’t failed; every single day now, I notice new, and surprisingly small, ways to do things differently. The first step to change, as Zutshi reminds me, is to become aware; to realize the impact things have.
Once
you start trying, she says, it’s unlikely to leave the people around
you untouched. And I know for one that ever since we started discussing
this story, my immediate neighbour at my workspace has started puzzling
the Dunkin’ Donut staff in the building by thrusting his own mug towards
them instead of accepting their disposable coffee cup. Of course, since
it would then be unethical to accept their plastic stirrer, he’s been
deprived of sugar in his coffee.
***
What the new waste management rules say
This
year, the central government notified new rules for a more efficient
waste management system. If followed in all sincerity, it could truly
lead to a Swachh Bharat. However, for that to happen, there needs to
first be a concerted awareness programme. Here are some key rules that
you should pay attention to: 1. Source segregation of waste mandatory, whether at individual homes, gated communities or offices and institutions, in order to more efficiently reuse and recycle.
2. New townships and housing societies to develop in-house waste handling, as well as processing arrangement for biodegradable waste.
3. Producers, importers and brand owners of plastic and non-recyclable packaging and e-waste responsible for introducing a collect back system.
4. Increase thickness of plastic carry bags from 40 to 50 microns, thus increasing the cost by 20 %. The hope is to deter the distribution of free carry bags.
5. Phasing out the manufacture of all non-recyclable multilayered packaging within two years.
6. Every person responsible for organising an event in open space shall segregate and manage the waste.
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