India

Bags of Rubbish

The Ecologist Nov00

Plastic bags, say Robert Edwards and Rachel Kellett, are choking the life out of India. And that's just how the plastics industry wants it.

Non-degradable plastic bags are poisoning and clogging up India’s towns and cities. But solutions are hard to come by largely due to the political influence of India's plastics industry.

In April this year the Lucknow Times of India reported that local cows were dying as a result of eating discarded plastic bags. The number of cows was estimated to be 100 a day. ¬The affected animal has a skeletal body but an abnormally bloated stomach. It eagerly goes to the trough but only sniffs at the fodder apparently unable to eat anything. It gradually becomes weak due to starvation and then finally becomes immobile. The end, which is excruciatingly painful, may take three or four days but surely not everyone will have the courage to watch it,’ declared Ranjan Dubey, who runs a shelter for cows in Lucknow.

It was not the first time that such a story had been reported in the Indian press. But the plight of the Lucknow cows caught the national imagination. Photographer Manmohan Sharma stimulated it further with a shocking exhibition made up of photos of a rumenotomy (an operation on a cow’s stomach, to remove the ingested plastic). The growing problem of plastic waste in India, which has been avoided by the authorities for years, was finally coming home to roost.

Plastic economics

Material waste has only recently become a feature of Indian life  and it was the advent of non-biodegradable plastic that largely created it. Plastic litter has grown in proportion to the expansion of the plastics industry. In the mid-1980s the government of India sanctioned a huge increase in the national production of plastic so that India would become self-sufficient in petrochemical products and be able to compete in the global plastics market. Over 50 per cent of all plastic produced in India is used for packaging. Most of this is discarded once used, and in a country where traditionally waste was largely unknown, this has caused a massive environmental problem.

This problem of plastic litter is perhaps surprising in India with its well-known tradition of recycling, in which nothing is wasted and everything is valued. It is a tradition that, though changing, is still strong. All over the country, material objects like bottles are cleaned out and reused many times in many different ways and if they break, they will be mended. Even plastic is often recycled  so-called ¬plastic mechanics’ visit people’s houses to repair broken plastics by the simple process of heat fusion. And when the material is threadbare, and completely beyond repair, it is often picked up by human scavengers known as ragpickers 60 per cent of whom are children, 30 per cent women and only 10 per cent men (mainly old and disabled)  who pick and sort waste with their bare hands and then sell it on for whatever they can get.

The Indian government and the plastics industry claim that India has the highest rate of plastic recovery in the world  between 40 per cent and 80 per cent of all plastics produced. But be this as it may, the waste problem remains; and mainly for the practical reason that the ragpickers don’t collect plastic bags, for simple reasons of economics. Although plastic fetches about 12 rupees per kilo in the waste market, it takes between 450 and 800 flimsy polythene bags to make up a kilo  and if they are soiled the price drops. This makes them an extremely unattractive economic proposition for even the most destitute ragpicker.

The plastic carrier bag is left to clog up the streets, gutters and countryside of India. In the words of one Delhi environmentalist: ¬omnipresent, the plastic carry bag has strewn itself everywhere. In gardens, parks, drains, garbage dumps, on branches of trees and even in bird nests, it can be found to exist, propagating almost like a life form’.

In the towns, cities and tourist centres where the plastic bag problem has become a plague, attempts to cure it have begun to spring up. The initial campaign against plastic began in the hill station of Simla, in the state of Himachal Pradesh. Previously a retreat for the colonial British, Simla is now a popular holiday venue for the metropolitan middle classes escaping the heat of the plains. The population rises 100 per cent or more in the summer months, and with it arrives plastic rubbish. As a direct result of this, in July 1996, the Himachal state government passed India’s first Non-Biodegradable Waste Act.

But it wasn’t as good as it sounded, for the Act didn’t ban the use of plastic bags in Simla, it merely banned the ¬haphazard discarding’ of non-biodegradable waste. Further legislation was passed which taxed local production of plastic bags to discourage their use in favour of paper or jute bags. But the lack of nationwide action meant that, to avoid the tax, plastic bags were simply manufactured in Delhi or elsewhere and then transported to Himachal.

In wealthy Goa, meanwhile, the problem is not only plastic bags but also plastic mineral water bottles, carried everywhere by foreign tourists fearful of waterborne diseases. With no collection system, mountains of empty plastic bottles pile up in sand dunes behind its white sand beaches. In January 1998, Goa passed a similar act to that of Himachal Pradesh, but it has never been seriously implemented. Lack of funds to purchase the dustbins and lack of suitable dumping sites are quoted as the main hurdles faced by the local bodies.

Other states have also tried to tame the plastic bag. Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir and the autonomous Ladakh Hill Development Council have all instituted ¬bans’ on the use of plastic bags, with varying degrees of success.

Enter the Plastics Task Force

It became increasingly clear that such a national problem requires a national solution. A 16-member National Plastics Waste Management Task Force (NPWMTF) was convened in May 1996 by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF). It met eight times behind closed doors to find a solution to the problems of plastic waste.

At the first meeting, it was quite reasonably proposed that the plastics industry should take responsibility for its waste. Dr Dilip Biswas, its chairman, recommended the adoption of a ¬buy-back’ system as a pilot project in major cities. Buy-back or take-back, through deposits and refunds, is a system that has existed successfully for years in India with glass bottles. The price charged by the retailer for each bottle includes a deposit refunded when the bottle is returned. Used bottles are collected, cleaned, disinfected, refilled with the same product and returned to the trading point. It is an effective circular system, using the same transport system for collection as delivery.

But the Task Force rejected the idea, and the minutes of the meetings, which we obtained, revealed how the plastics industry simply refused to accept any responsibility for the waste it produced. Instead, it continued to place the onus of waste management on the shoulders of local authorities and consumers. Its logic was stunning. ¬Due to the fact that plastics are used with consumer comfort in view,’ industry representatives said to the Task Force, ¬it is also the responsibility of the consumer to ensure that plastic products being used by them are recycled.’ In other words, the industry was not prepared to countenance measures that would increase its costs or reduce its sales and take-back could do both.

How did this happen? Quite simply the political influence of the plastics industry in India is profound. For example, before the Lucknow cow raised the issue of plastic bag litter to a spiritual level (the cow being holy to Hindus), the biggest public furore over plastic happened in Mumbai, the industrial centre of India where most of the plastics industry is headquartered. In 1998, the June monsoon rains flooded the city. Millions of plastic bags clogged the underground drainage system and made the floods much worse than they would otherwise have been. The Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC) responded immediately, passing a resolution to place a ban on plastics. But then, the very next day, the mayor, having entertained a delegation from the plastics industry, suddenly retracted the ban. ¬Any decision taken in a hurry,’ he explained, ¬would adversely affect a large number of workers in the plastics industry.’

The employment argument is often used by the Indian plastics industry to justify the status quo. But as Dr Asad Rahmani, director of the Bombay Natural History Society, put it, ¬the plastics industry, a fairly strong lobby, is trying hard to raise objections (to a ban). But I find their talk of putting people out of employment if the bag industry is sealed off, pure humbug. There are thousands who make a living out of drug peddling, but that does not mean that drug peddling should be allowed to continue and flourish’.

Crooked solutions

It was in this context, that the government of India proposed its first ¬nationwide solution’ to the plastic bag problem. Taking advice from the Plastics Task Force, the plastics problem was redefined: the problem was that plastic bag waste was too thin for the ragpicker to collect and recycle. Therefore the solution was simple: plastic bags should be made thicker. The government promptly passed a ¬notification’, to be implemented in all states. Only bags at least 20 microns thick could now be manufactured.

For the plastics industry, this ¬solution’ is perfect. The ragpickers, in theory, will now collect the bags for 'recycling', so the public eyesore will be removed. This in turn will remove the plastics industry's image problem. And, crucially, more plastics will be needed  so more will be produced. As a result, there will also be more resource use, more pollution  and probably more waste.

In Uttar Pradesh (UP), meanwhile, the plastics industry reacted swiftly to news about cows being killed by plastic bags. On 17 April the president of the UP Plastic Product Association (UPPPA) said that the issue was political propaganda and an attempt by the government to deflect public attention from the inefficiency of the state government and the municipal corporations. The issue of the cow was not addressed. But the holy Hindu cow might have the last laugh - despite the UPPPA’s opposition and intransigence, in July this year the state government of Uttar Pradesh banned plastic bags.

Whether this legislation will ever be fully implemented remains to be seen.

Robert Edwards worked as a toxics campaigner in India for Greenpeace International. Rachel Kellett worked to build electronic networks for environmental NGOs in India. Their book Life in Plastic is published by Other India Press. Their web site with updated news is www.lifeinplastic.com.