Bangkok’s sewer cleaners have it far better than those in India, despite the former being mostly prisoners who do the dirty work, literally, and get commuted sentences based on the amount of work they do. India’s sewer cleaners end up suffering from ill health because of the filth that their bodies are exposed to.
Today, drains are clogged even more than normal because of the abundance of plastic waste. Take Bangkok for example. The city has been suffering from floods for years now with the main reason being clogged drains due to plastic waste. Thailand is one of the top five consumers of plastic in the world. On an average, Thais use around eight plastic bags a day. In contrast, someone in France uses around 80 a year. In Bangkok, this results in serious trouble, especially considering the fact that the city lies just 50 centimeters above sea level. In India, the number of plastic bags used per person per day will be closer to Thailand’s figures than France’s.
India is no stranger to disasters due to plastic waste clogging up drains. Mumbai and Kolkata, for instance, have both experienced floods for this very reason. But the plastic waste keeps piling up. Take Goa for example. Nearer the coastal belt, the borders of most unused swathes of land, the little streams and rivulets and even clusters of trees on the beach are filled with piles of garbage, and plastic waste makes up a substantial part of it.
Most food and beverage establishments serve water by the bottle, many even do the same for aerated beverages. Takeaway orders and parcels are packed in plastic bags and all market vendors use them liberally too. Even increasing the micron thickness of these bags doesn’t change the fact that they are a problem and are not reused as often as they should be. Goa produces almost 500 metric tonnes of solid waste per day; plastic waste makes up around 12 to 15 percent of that amount. There are no recycling programmes as such in Goa as yet, which means that over 50 tonnes of plastic waste is discarded every day.
While supermarkets in Goa and India, as well as other establishments in urban areas, have now started to charge for plastic or switch to cloth and paper bags, but this is still only a very small percentage of the Indian population that is getting wary of plastic use. Perhaps, the only solution is to have a blanket ban on the use of plastic but when will that happen, and will it just be too late? Bans don’t always work that well. Recycling and spreading more awareness is necessary.
