No More Plastic Bags Please...

WHEN was the last time you got your grocery packed in paper bags? Or sipped tea from a kulhad (earthen cup)? These are things of the past now. Driven out of the market by the increasing monopoly of the most conspicuous symbol of the modern throw-away culture: plastics.

Cheaper, lighter, durable and marvelously protean, this wonder material has captured almost every imaginable corner of modern life. From consumer durables to construction material to prosthetics, not to mention the packaging of a million other products. Add to this the fact that it can be recycled, which, argue its apologists, makes both economic and eco-sense. If plastic is so wonderful, why are eco-groups like Greenpeace and, closer home, Shristi waging war against PVC (Poly Vinyl Chloride), the most widely used plastic in the world? PVC has been indicted on the following counts:

• As disposable incomes have grown, so has plastic waste. According to one estimate we threw away about 2,600 tonnes of plastic in 1995. This is predicted to swell to about 10,000 tonnes by AD 2000. As this waste is non-biodegradable, it has become a constant headache for municipalities—streets littered and drains clogged with PVC bags and bottles, all tell-tale signs of an impending crisis.
• Says Ravi Agarwal of Shristi, a Delhi-based NGO: "With no national policy yet on how to tame this growing nuisance, plastic wastes continue to be recycled, or incinerated with utter disregard for public health. When Asia's largest plastic scrap market in Delhi's Jwalapuri was gutted in 1995, nobody knew how much damage was done by the toxic gases to the respiratory systems of nearby residents." The market has since been shifted to the suburban Mundka village in west Delhi. But the fires haven't stopped. Says Chiranji Lal, a plastic waste broker: "There's a fire every year. Not surprising, with 100-odd brokers, each handling about 250 tonnes of PVC waste per month."
• Incinerating to get rid of the waste is not a good idea. Though it yields power, it also releases toxic gases, such as dioxins, into the air. Also, PVC is never completely burnt; for every tonne of PVC burnt, 0.9 tonne of waste salts containing toxic metals are produced. This residue is dumped in landfills and may leach into the groundwater.
• Dumping PVC wastes in landfills is equally risky. There are high chances of loosely bound carcinogenic chemicals, added to PVC to make it stable, leaking into ground-water. Apart from being eyesores, siting landfills is a politically tricky business. Not surprisingly, most landfills are located close to slums.
• Being in the informal sector, there are no environmental guidelines for recycling PVC. The recycling machine (it converts plastic waste into granules) and the reprocessor (it makes products out of the granules) are largely inefficient and polluting. There's no saying how much unhygienic plastic is recycled into packaging for food and medicines.
• According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), recycling of PVC is a major source of dioxins, arguably the second most toxic substance produced by man. Consequently, many western manufacturers have been looking at ways to replace PVC. AEG of Germany, one of the world's biggest appliance manufacturers, has stopped using PVC and Siemens plans to follow suit.
• Besides, it's not easy to recycle PVC. Greenpeace's report on the toxicity of chlorine, titled The Stranger, explains: "Because of the toxic additives used to make it stable, PVC can rarely be recycled into its original form. In the West, recycling has mostly been replaced by incineration as the costs of collection, sorting and reprocessing are greater than the price of virgin polymers." In India, the Rs 2,500-crore per annum plastic recycling business is a flourishing cottage industry due to ragpickers, mostly children, whose labour is plentiful and cheap. Says Ramesh Aggarwal, a recycler in Delhi: "There isn't much money in it as it's energy-intensive. If a plant is run for 10-12 hours daily, the monthly electricity bill would amount to Rs 40,000. Mostly, power is stolen in connivance with DESU officials."
• PVC production plants have been termed as dioxin factories. A majority of makers of virgin plastics do not adhere to environmental norms. As a result, workers are often exposed to dangerous chemicals.
• Plastics are not so inert as perceived hitherto. The authors of Our Stolen Future have cited animal experiments where chemicals such as alkylphenols (added to polystyrene and PVC to make them more stable) were found to disrupt the animals' endocrine system. These chemicals have also been linked to dropping sperm counts and defeminisation. Scientists, however, caution that they do not know enough yet to construe this as a public health crisis.

So is PVC guilty? The industry insists the prosecution has little evidence to prove its case. They cite studies to show results to the contrary. "But," argues Shristi's Agarwal, "if governments were to dismiss them on grounds of insufficient evidence, most environmental battles would fizzle out." Environmentalists, therefore, often invoke the 'Precautionary Principle' which states that even if the evidence is doubtful, it should be deemed sufficient—lest the allegation is proved right only with high human cost.

If PVC really is the villain environmentalists make it out to be, where lies the solution? Proposing a ban on PVC would be too ambitious. Failing that, concerned governments can attempt either of the following strategies: improve technology and/or influence consumer's sense of responsibility towards the environment through law.

The first option would entail installing state-of-the-art incinerators and landfills and recycling plants permitting little pollution. An expensive proposition. "Besides," remarks Agarwal, "technology still won't solve the problem of dioxins leaking into the air or leaching into groundwater."

MONEY being a constraint, the second option is probably a safer bet. Measures such as forcing the industry to take care of the plastic waste it is responsible for, or enforcing strict safety guidelines, depend on political will. After much delay, the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has finally drawn up guidelines for the recycling industry. It has, for instance, made it mandatory for recycled products to indicate the percentage and kind of recycled material used. Or, print the following information on the product: "This product is made of (indicate materials) and is reusable/recyclable, and does not cause any toxic chemical reactions during incineration or any other way of disposal." The BIS also proposes a ban on reprocessing of dirty plastic waste and a prohibition on using recycled plastic products for storing foodstuffs, drinking water and medicines.

Furthermore, the National Task Force for Management of Plastic Waste is soon to launch awareness-building steps, such as asking people to be more discerning consumers. Consumer behaviour can be changed by imposing taxes on widely used plastic products. Such disincentives (also called eco-taxes) have been quite successful in Europe. In India, Himachal Pradesh tried this idea by slapping a 30 per cent tax on plastic bags to drive them out of the waste stream. But as is the fate of most legislations in India, the HP Non-biodegradable Garbage (control) Act, 1995, after an initial run of success, failed to change people's attitudes.

It's a classic faceoff between economics and environment. The plastics industry, which boasts of corporate giants like Reliance, NOCIL and IPCL, remains unconvinced about the anxieties of the greens. It cannot understand what's all the hoopla about, considering India's per capita consumption is a mere 1.4 kg as against a world average of 18 kg (in the US and Japan it is as high as 70 kg). True, the scale of the problem may not be staggering, but at an annual growth rate of 14 per cent (28 per cent for PVC), we may be hurtling towards a plastic waste crisis. Surely, the industrialists can't ignore their responsibility for the burgeoning plastic waste and the problems of its disposal. The West is already paying for their mistakes. Must we repeat them?