Plastic Waste Management: Will The Latest Ban Work?

Mahesh Vijapurkar

The experience with banning plastic use has not been positive. The prohibition of plastics of thickness of under 20 microns by most municipal corporations in Maharashtra, it was flouted with abandon for two simple reasons: the convenience on one hand and very lax enforcement.

It choked the drains, it littered the public spaces, and also piled up in the dumping grounds. The annual flooding is not just because of heavy rains but the plastic choking the drains. And now, suddenly Maharashtra has notified a ban, effective Ugadi (GudiPadava)and it is anybody’s guess as to how it would all work out.

Prima facie, there are two reasons, one why it could work, another why it possibly would not. The first positive is that the user is to be fined, not just the manufacturer of and supplier. That has already a small section of population decide to adhere to the new rule, not necessarily because of environmental considerations but fear.

For the fines are hefty enough to deter - Rs 5,000 for the first offence, Rs 10,000 on the second, and Rs 25,000 on the third. It includes a jail term. The other side is that many shops continue to have and use these bags on the simple reasoning that the enforcement would take time, and they could use it till the machinery is activated.

The impression that if the authorities couldn’t enforce the 2016’s 50 microns rule, it would be a while before this new ban is brought strictly into play. There already are signs of poor think-through with regard to the implementation of the ban. For instance, it is not clear how a regular offender would be identified, and by whom.

All self-government entities have been told to set up collection centres to where, within a month, all disposable plastic has to be deposited. What happens to it after that is still a question up in the air. The disposables are bags, cups, spoons, thermocol, et al. And given their wide use, it could be quite a task.

But simultaneously, the government has allowed the existing stocks with the manufacturers to be brought into the market till they are exhausted. This open-endedness runs afoul of the one-month period for discarding what is in possession for use. This is a confusing contradiction, even as it has declared only half-litre bottles used for packaging water as disposable, not the larger ones.

While that does defy logic, it has stayed clear of use of plastics for packaging of branded consumer apparently because the 2016 notification had put the burden on the retailers to take care of the plastic in which the items are packed, but utterly failed. Now, they have been exempted. It makes retailing to remain easy to handle but does not add to the purpose.

And here comes the harder part: sachets which carry the milk to your home to be collected and recycled by the dairies, but how the unorganised milk distribution sector would cope with it is unclear. Till the process of a bag being recycled, 50 paise on it is with the dairy. Likewise, with the bottlers, who levy Re 1 per 500 ml biottle. Curiously, none of these manufacturers had been taken into confidence and told to prepare for recycling. Setting up these facilities is not an overnight job.

The taste of the pudding can be had quite some time from now, and by then, the ingredients could change, or remain unattended to. But operationalising this good intention the issue is indeed big for the state has close to 1000 bottlers. About 500 bag-makers. About 30 lakh small water bottles are sold per day, and together, all these generate about half a million tonnes of plastic waste per year.