PANAJI
Beer bottles strewn carelessly along the state’s beaches, rivers and popular tourist sites may well get a new lease of life soon, if the ‘Beer Bottle Project’, a sustainable initiative that is slowly gathering attention, manages to flip the littering trend.
For now, in the absence of a mechanism to process used beer bottles and incentives to recycle the glass litter, the millions of used beer bottles have no takers and they end up choking the already stressed ecosystem in the fast-developing coastal stretch of Goa.
According to Jerusha D’Souza, spokesperson for Sensible Earth, a Salvador do Mundo-based centre for sustainability, the ‘Beer Bottle Project’ aims to reduce the one-time usage of glass beer bottles in Goa by incentivizing waste pickers, collaborating with local beer companies to reuse their own bottles and goad policy intervention to put an end to avoidable litter.
And there is a need to address the issues, she says, because while plastic takes 400 years to degrade, glass takes a million years.
“We started the ‘Beer Bottle Project’ because we realised that beer bottles are becoming a huge problem because people have started using glass as a single-use object, like they do with plastic. Glass actually takes much much longer, a million years, to degrade as compared to plastic which can take around 400 years,” she said.
“So, actually from what we understand, there seems to be a space issue. Big companies still take their bottles back, but retail outlets are still not keen on doing it because they do not have the space to store empty bottles. Glass is expensive to transport, so even the transportation of bottles back and forth is becoming an issue. Manufacturing new bottles is cheaper than recycling old bottles,” D’Souza also said.
D’Souza said that the germ of the ‘Beer Bottle Project’ stemmed from the fact that beer bottles are ubiquitous across Goa’s landscape.
A recent survey had also thrown up a non-surprising factual nugget about beer topping the list of preferred alcohol among tourists. No prizes for guessing that, but the fact that the nearly 40 lakh beer bottles, which are bottles and pushed out in the market every month, have no takers once they are guzzled down. The ‘Beer Bottle Project’ aims to get the stakeholders involved in planning a strategy to address litter caused by beer bottles.
“Right now what we want to do is get in touch with some of the local companies and figure out solutions around the issue, like where we can collect the bottles, maybe we can wash the bottles at a particular centre. This is still in the early stages. And, hopefully, we can bring about policy change at some point,” D’Souza said.
Re-introducing the concept of bottle deposits in retail stores may be one of the strategies she said.
“The best thing would be to bring back the deposit, in a way that makes sense to all parties involved. People should be able to give back their bottles and be paid for it as an incentive. We would like to put the onus on the customer and make them aware that the bottle they are using is worth something,” she said. “We want to sort of convey that this can be a two-pronged practice, which makes it feasible for waste-pickers to collect bottles at a better price, it just works for them as well as for the government because the beaches will be cleaner,” she also said.
