Instead, government could've imposed ban on the consumer products which are wrapped using plastic material. Almost 50% plastic come directly from such consumer products sold by all FMCG companies. Such plastic material which is used as a wrapper (e.g. mineral bottles, wrappers of chocolates, biscuits, wafers, tobacco, etc.) is often useless and people tend to throw it right away.
I agree that "we", the people need to take a pledge to stop using plastic as much as we can. But if there's no restriction put on giant FMCG companies such as Hindustan Unilever, ITC, Patanjali, Netsle, Procter and Gamble, etc. from supplying their products wrapped in plastic, I consider all of these government initiatives merely as a gimmick.
EDIT 2:
In India, plastic is a major contributor of blocking sewers and rivers, especially in rainy seasons. Another important problem plastic waste produces is that since government bodies (such as, municipal corporations, gram panchayats, etc.) are unable to dump and/or recycle plastic waste properly, it is accidentally consumed by animals and is the major reason for their deaths. Another issue is that, often "dumping waste" is considered as "burning" it. Burning plastic waste disturbs healthy air and is a major factor among others responsible for the increased air pollution in Indian cities recently.
>Instead, government could've imposed ban on the consumer products which are wrapped using plastic material. Almost 50% plastic come directly from such consumer products sold by all FMCG companies. Such plastic material which is used as a wrapper (e.g. mineral bottles, wrappers of chocolates, biscuits, wafers, tobacco, etc.) is often useless and people tend to throw it right away.
Broadly speaking, that would be a terrible backwards step for the environment. Plastic packaging often reduces waste by protecting the product from spoilage and damage.
A lot of people bemoan the plastic wrapping on cucumbers, but that wrapping doubles the shelf life of the product. It's a net win, because the environmental impact of wasted cucumbers is far greater than the environmental impact of a gram or two of polyethylene wrapping.
Many people argue that milk should be sold in re-usable glass containers rather than disposable bottles or cartons, but the environmental case is really marginal. The glass bottle is considerably more energy-intensive to produce and transport, with more energy used to collect and wash it for re-use. Returnable glass bottles are often worse than disposable plastic if the transport distance is too great and/or the breakage rate is too high. In many cases, the best option is reusable plastic bottles, which are less energy-intensive to manufacture, lighter to transport and more durable than glass.
Plastic is a wonderful material that has an important role to play in a sustainable economy. There has been a huge increase in the quality and availability of bio-based and biodegradable plastics in the packaging industry. We have irrationally demonised a very useful material, creating a huge distraction from much more serious environmental problems.
If you buy a beef steak wrapped in plastic, the problem is the steak, not the wrapper. The plastic wrapper produced ~10g of CO2 and required ~100ml of water to produce; the steak produced ~7kg of CO2 and required ~4,000 litres of water to produce. As long as it is disposed of responsibly, a whole trash bag full of plastic packaging has a negligible environmental impact compared to a single portion of beef.
While CO₂ emission is important, this is not primary reason for banning plastic bags. It's plastic in various states of (un)decomposition all over the ecosystem.
A cucumber is 100% biodegradable with no solid residue. The plastic that wraps it will take a long time to decompose and is likely to be found clogging up some piece of nature—whether in the soil, affecting plants or obstructing some body function of an animal.
Plastic packaging doesn't spontaneously release itself into the ecosystem, it's put there by someone irresponsibly managing waste. Norway and the Netherlands are both trialling waste-to-energy incineration with carbon capture. Failing that, there's nothing particularly wrong with well-managed landfill.
You're confusing waste that is properly disposed of with waste that is not. The problem is waste that is improperly disposed of and neither of those are solutions to that problem.
I don't think jdietrich is confusing anything; they explicitly said:
> Plastic packaging doesn't spontaneously release itself into the ecosystem, it's put there by someone irresponsibly managing waste.
They are (correctly, IMO) pointing out that this is a classic case of missing the root cause; it's a commonly held position that plastic containers are inherently bad for the environment, and that position leads to laws like the one in the OP.
My read of jdietrich's posts was that a more nuanced approach would be more optimal; the problem is not plastic containers per se, it's poor disposal.
Keep in mind that India has less well developed infrastructure than Norway and the Netherlands, and so it's much harder to dispose of waste properly. More investment in this sort of service might be a better long-run strategy in terms of national cost/benefit. (Or it might not, depending on how much it would cost to improve the infrastructure; but the discussion about whether it's a good idea should make an analysis on that point.)
That's correct.
Indians litter. It's a cultural thing, I guess. Filthiest place on earth. (Don't downvoted me unless you have been to India.)
It's sad that the solution is to ban plastic bags and the like... I'm not against the solution. But, the problem is Indians who think nothing of tossing trash out into the street and would be genuinely confused if you suggested they clean up after themselves.
I’ve been to India many times, and it’s true most people there litter without much thought. Once while ‘adapting myself to the culture’ I threw a plastic water bottle away on a street corner that was already heavy with garbage; and just then an elderly Indian man chastised me for littering!
## Problem 1:
The problem is not culture, but of poor govt. I as a responsible person want to throw this wrapper, there is no dustbin you'll find for kilometers on end sometimes.
Do you expect me to carry the wrapper back to my home or carry a small dustbin along with me every time?
## Problem 2:
You would've noticed, most Indian homes are pretty clean (within reason and corresponding to income level). This is because we care for our private property. Govt is a body which owns public property and doesn't take care of roads and streets (which are public property). This will refute your claim that this is an issue of culture (because we keep our private property, houses, hotels, malls, etc clean).
## Solution (proposed):
This is going to be against mainstream and HN views.
1) Privatize roads and streets (takes care of problem 2)
2) Privatize waste collection (takes care of problem 1)
But we won't do it anytime soon, because reasons (we'll I know the reasons, but just don't want to type them down here).
>Do you expect me to carry the wrapper back to my home or carry a small dustbin along with me every time?
Yes. I don't know you and my comment isn't directed to you. But this is what I meant by 'confused' in my post... It seems many from that culture genuinely think it is absurd to clean up after oneself. The distinction between public and private property has no bearing on how a westerner feels about littering. Indeed, a westerner would be LESS inclined to litter on public property than on his own.
In the West, when one drops a piece of paper or bottle, the thought is (or should be) that you are making life harder for someone else who will eventually have to pick it up.
It's the reason you can rely on Westerners, generally, to clean their own tables and toss out their own trash at fast food restaurants. (Or at least briefly feel guilty about it if they don't). It's the reason you can rely on Westerners to return their grocery carts to the collection points. It's empathy... we don't want to make life harder for the poor worker. I do not believe this feeling of empathy is pervasive in Indian cultures... maybe just a left-over from the caste system...
I am Indian and this comment is painful but I agree with a lot of it. Some have actually challenged me "why not litter, I pay taxes for that".
Indian society is very hierarchical and shitting on the rung below you is very ingrained in us. What makes matters worse is that people are so unaccustomed to considerate treatment from the rung above that this is almost an alien concept to them. Hence it does not occur to them as often as it should to be considerate to others.
Just the other day I witnessed an argument. A lady passerby was very annoyed. The construction worker who was doing some welding work on an overhanging grill did not stop to let the lady pass without sparks landing on her. The construction worker's reaction was essentially 'WTF are you talking about'. The fact is that the construction worker probably would have never have experienced a situation where someone stopped work momentarily for his convenience. Its an alien notion. On the other side no one in the lady's social circle would have been a construction worker even if we include multiple generations.
> Do you expect me to carry the wrapper back to my home or carry a small dustbin along with me every time?
FYI: in many urban areas in the USA, the expectation is that you carry a "poop bag" and pickup all the poop your dog makes whenever you walk your dog.
This isn't true across the entire USA. Its definitely a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. But still, these are the things a lot of liberal cities expect their citizens to do (and things that citizens actually do, because there are enough people who care)
In fact, there are poop-bag dispensers found at parks. There is literally an industry which makes dog-poop bags: http://www.poopbags.us
> Do you expect me to carry the wrapper back to my home
That's what I do.
BTW its not that the govt does not put bins, they keep getting stolen. One could argue that the govt could guard them better. I doubt that it would be cost effective.
Someone who is stealing garbage bins probably has a pretty desperate incentive, or these thefts are a part of systemic corruption. Its actually both. Making incentives weaker would go a long way towards a longer term solution.
Its likely that it suits the government fine that the bins get stolen, the contract was given to the private company owned by minister's brother in law. Now they are both happy that they have more bins to order. BTW that brother in law is the one who arranged for those to get stolen in the first place.
Please elaborate why privatization will fix the problem. Not disbelieving, want to understand the solution you propose.
3) Tax plastic and use those taxes to pay for bins and removal. This has the dual effect of incentivizing the use of less plastic and paying for clean up.
I’m not sure I buy the “it’s cultural” argument. I’ve been to India and to plenty of other places, and there is a littering problem everywhere. It seems to be worse wherever there are lots of people and mediocre rule of law. I don’t think any one culture instinctively litters more than any other.
Certain kinds of waste are more likely to end up being improperly disposed of. When was the last time you saw a cucumber wrapper or steak package blowing in the wind? I bet you see a lot more coffee cups and plastic bottles.
When people unwrap groceries, they do so in their home, and it tends to get disposed of properly. It's stuff people use on the go that most frequently becomes litter.
By his logic, we should plastic wrap every vegetable and fruit. That is nonsensical.
Humans don't dispose of things properly. That's a fact. Creating more plastic waste will create more plastic pollution.
It's far easier to not create the waste in the first place. And there are ways to reduce CO2 that don't involve creating exponentially more plastic waste.
Again, producers don't plastic wrap cucumbers to save CO2. The entire premise is ridiculous.
Charge producers for the waste their products create. That will incentivize less waste. Charge them for the CO2 they emit. That will incentivize a reduction in CO2. You can accomplish both with market signals.
>By his logic, we should plastic wrap every vegetable and fruit. That is nonsensical.
Not at all. Cucumbers have a relatively short shelf-life due to a high water content and a permeable skin, so wrapping them makes economic and environmental sense. Apples and citrus fruits don't need plastic packaging, but their shelf life is considerably enhanced by the application of a protective wax coating. Some products like loose salad leaves need modified atmosphere packaging to achieve a satisfactory shelf life, while delicate soft fruits require a protective packaging system that could involve a variety of wood- or plastic-based products. I'm indifferent to points of principle, I care about choosing the most sustainable tool for any given task.
The critical environmental issue in our fruit and vegetable supply is the needlessly high use of air freight to maintain supplies of out-of-season produce. A single package of asparagus or green beans might produce emissions of >10kg CO2e, simply because of their transport mode. If you want to reduce the sustainability of your produce consumption, that one issue overwhelms pretty much everything else.
>It's far easier to not create the waste in the first place. And there are ways to reduce CO2 that don't involve creating exponentially more plastic waste.
You're trading one kind of waste for another. Plastic packaging is wasteful in one sense because it is disposable, but it reduces a potentially far greater waste by protecting products during transportation and storage. Plastic isn't always the most sustainable packaging material, but it often is. That decision needs to be made based on hard facts, not the presumption that plastic is evil.
>Charge producers for the waste their products create. That will incentivize less waste. Charge them for the CO2 they emit. That will incentivize a reduction in CO2.
I'm fully in favour of both, as long as those charges represent the actual economic impacts of mitigating those issues.
The problem with your reasoning is that it's based on your cultural and community experience and not that of the typical Indian. You're considering the impact of that law on your lifestyle and assuming it will impact all others in the same way.
How many people in India are buying their vegetables in plastic wrap from the big box grocery store?
According to unicef, 50% of the population in India defecate in the open. It wasn't until 2014 that a municipal in Delhi passed a law penalizing people for public littering and defecation. There are no national laws.
It will require a cultural revolution to combat littering in India. In the mean time banning the most harmful forms of litter will help to combat the growing problem.
I'm an Indian and your statements are ignorant and myopic. Let me explain.
Littering is in every country not just India. Certain countries deal with it in a better way.
Banning something doesn't evaporate it's demand. Like, people litter because there are not dustbins (at least not often enough) on the street in India.
Open defecation is unrelated to this issue. Main reason open defecation happens is because there is no continuous supply of water (by the Govt) or proper sewage system (responsibility of the govt).
We need to stop blaming ourselves and think what is the root cause of the problem - Government.
PS: I've thought my stance through about this, please think through this and see whether or not Govt is to blame for this. Govt is not you and I. All govts these days are Govts of the people by the bureaucracy for the bureaucracy.
> Littering is in every country not just India. Certain countries deal with it in a better way.
Most deal with it by passing laws a municipal levels of government making it illegal in conjunction with providing refuse bins. Only one municipality in India has done this.
> Open defecation is unrelated to this issue.
It's actually very much related, you state that people litter due to lack of refuse bins and openly defecate because of the lack of toilets. The reason I mention it is that while India does not have national laws around littering, they do have them for open defecation. Since the Swachh Bharat mission was launched in 2014 there have been significant reductions in the % of the population that openly defecate yet even in homes with access to toilets they aren't seeing 100% usage. In homes with government provided toilets they've seen upwards of 40% of people still choosing to openly defecate and of those a large percentage say they prefer the openness of defecating outdoors. It is most definitely a behavioral and cultural issue.
Littering out of convenience is cultural/behavioral and not due to any failing of the government. If it were purely down to a lack of refuse receptacles then how do you explain the state of most venues after an event? I've never been to a movie theater, music venue, or athletics stadium that did not have copious refuse bins to collect trash and yet people still litter. To further drive home the fact that is indeed culture look no further than the Japanese who have cleanliness so culturally ingrained that they stick around after World Cup matches to help clean the stadium.
At least some cultures are amenable to training not to litter everywhere. In the US there was a big campaign in the 1970's and 80's to reduce litter on roadsides and other places. $1000 fines and a general positive attitude to group action has reduced litter in most places in the US that a yearly or less pickup schedule can keep even urban highways pretty clean. Monthly street sweeping elsewhere does the job. I don't see (much) plastic litter in the landscape in the US. In other countries, maybe other methods are needed.
> Humans don't dispose of things properly. That's a fact. Creating more plastic waste will create more plastic pollution.
Are you implying we should create less humans in a first place?
> It's far easier to not create the waste in the first place. And there are ways to reduce CO2 that don't involve creating exponentially more plastic waste.
If it is easy, then why aren't you a billionaire already?
More seriously, the solution is probably a combination of awareness about over consumption (reducing the production of waste), and investments into better waste management for the concerned countries.
This is a really great point that deserves to be it's own comment, rather than a reply to another. The two greatest challenges facing us in the next few years are climate change and water usage. Plastic is an issue, but it's not a life-or-death-for-the-species problem. We can figure plastic out later. We already are discovering bacteria and other organisms that can digest plastics.
It seems to me we have a kind of liberal guilt when it comes to plastic production. As if we're defiling this green and pleasant land with something alien to the universe. We're almost certainly not producing anything that hasn't already existed. We should stop acting like we are. (The same goes for nuclear waste.) As long as plastics are disposed responsibly in ways that don't damage plants and animals, what's the issue?
> As long as plastics are disposed responsibly in ways that don't damage plants and animals, what's the issue?
Please don't discount one of the biggest issues though. I've told folks their plastic bottle is about to blow away (overlooking lands end, right over the ocean). The person picks it up, walks a bit further up the trail and throw it in the bushes. I've had folks throw their cigarette butt on the side of the road on Independence pass. I asked them to pick it up, and they noodled around at the ground with their foot as if to find it, then hop in their car and take off.
We should design for some irresponsibility and more so in places where there isn't much environmental consciousness.
You're referring to anecdotes. Maybe the sort of behaviour is widespread, but even if it is, you then need to prove it's having much of an impact on the environment, and even then it's a drop in the ocean compared with the damage done via climate change and water consumption.
We need to get out of our parochial ideas about waste. Plastics are aesthetically bad, but other forces are quantitatively way worse.
> Plastics are aesthetically bad, but other forces are quantitatively way worse.
I don't agree with this line of reasoning. We have room for more than one priority, and solving the waste pipeline is ultimately one of logistics and political will, as well as elbow grease and the pluck to get out there and pick up some garbage.
I've seen whole gaggles of people walk past a bottle lying on the ground next to a trash can, and no one would stoop over and pick it up and put it in the trash. Humans have this disease on societal scales, and the oceans are taking hell because of it.
The shit loads of trash in the ocean are from impoverished developing nations who use their rivers as garbage dumps. Not the ignorant yuppie who let's his Pepsi bottle blow into the marina.
Don't let a few assholes be a surrogate for justifiable outrage that comes from a completely different source on an incomprehensibly massive scale.
> Don't let a few assholes be a surrogate for justifiable outrage that comes from a completely different source on an incomprehensibly massive scale.
Oh I'm well acquainted with the problems in developing countries and they are disproportionately responsible for the state of the oceans. However, I'd say that they are all just degrees of the same problem. I've picked up lots of trash in developing countries, but also plenty along American highways, even in the most scenic areas of the country, and even seen it here and there even in the cleanest countries (Japan, Switzerland, Germany). I met some really nice people all over New Zealand who as volunteers simply go out and pick up garbage off the beach, in the bushes, trees, rivers, whereever it occurs. They recognize other places are shitholes but that doesn't stop them from doing something about the trash where they live. If you join in, in short order you can't help but realize that it isn't all washing up from some shithole in Southeast Asia, but a lot of it comes from local sources. Litter and dumping are universal problems.
Don't fall prey to the "solving the biggest problem first" fallacy. Yes, we need to fix the pipeline and help those countries develop waste management systems, we need to stop producing so much plastic, but hell, when there is trash laying around, just pick it up! Getting people involved in doing this is the best way for them to see that this is a widespread problem, not just some trashy fuckwits over there that we can blame it all on.
It probably won't come as a big surprise that I also would like to address the larger forces as well. That doesn't mean that we can't also want to address the garbage that is littering our oceans.
Seems to me the only way that wild fish will survive is if they become toxic to human consumption and even then we will probably keep eating them (see Japan and mercury contaminated tuna).
Energy appears to be obtainable sustainably (so a feeling manifests that it’s okay to waste it right now as long as we keep pedalling hard toward a clean solution ASAP). Plastic degradation appears to be a much harder problem. Also of course, helps that plastic garbage is “visible and ugly”, whereas climate change is abstract.
This is also my way of thinking. Don't worry about engergy, worry about waste and chemicals instead.
Solve all problems through more and more green energy (recycling, reusing, cleaning etc.) and smarter and smarter robots (cleaning, separating, mechanical solutions instead of chemicals).
The decision to use glass as the de-facto re-usable container medium has always driven me nuts. I think the "marketing" is that it's slightly "harder" (mentally) to throw away a nice glass bottle than it is a plastic container because we've been so conditioned to throw out the plastic ones.
I've long wondered why retailers don't offer a "refill" option for items like milk and liquid cleaning products. The bottles for laundry detergent in particular are usually thick plastic that rightfully could serve their purpose for a very long time. The store could have a big tank of the stuff and consumers can bring the re-usable bottle in for a refill at a worthwhile discount. Similar to what some retailers do with water and those re-fillable 5-gallon jugs. Perhaps the economics don't favor this for other products, but it seems like banning plastic in favor of heavier and less-re-usable options is just political hype without real examination, as you point out.
In Ukraine, there is a big French supermarket chain called Ашан (auchan.ua), in which people can buy liquid cleaning products by the volume.
For example, if you need a litre for dishwashing cleaning soap, you can go and pull a lever and fill an appropriate size plastic bottle.
It's their own brand and it's very cheap.
I'm not 100% sure if you can bring and use any plastic bottle, or you have first get it from them.
They also have huge crates of pasta and other grains where you can simply shove how much you want into a plastic bag, weight it and pay at the till.
No need to wrap those items in boxes and more containers.
While Ukraine has many environmental problems (it's not easy or common to recycle, large % of uneducated population about these issues), it has some good ideas and policies like these.
It's the same problem that you see in Japan to an even greater degree, consumers perceive packaging as giving the product added value, so market forces push high-end retailers away from no-packaging because it's associated with discount/low end shops. In the US you can buy lots of things in 'Bulk' if you go a store like WinCo, which is marketed as being cheap. Additionally the Bulk foods just aren't as fresh as what you'd find packaged by the half-pound at Whole Foods as least in my anecdotal experience.
Some detergent makers actually do sell refill bags that use far less plastic. There's also been a resurgence of milkmen in London and some other places, where you leave out your empty bottles and get a refill. While there aren't milkpeople where I live, there are a few places where I can pay a deposit on a glass bottle and then exchange it for a full bottle whenever I need.
It's not widespread by any means, but it is happening.
The re-usable detergent bags are nice, and many countries do distribute milk in thin plastic bags that you then empty into a pitcher at home.
But as parent points out, exchanging glass bottles isn't really better for the environment (in terms of CO2) as compared to properly disposing of plastic. No real reason why those deposit+refill bottles need to be glass; they could just as well be quality plastic and reduce some transport-weight. Similarly having a guy driving a truck around to deliver heavy liquids seems inefficient when you could just as well bring all your plastic bottle back to the store at one time and refill from big tanks there.
Would you mind providing some links to these biodegradeable plastics? The last time I checked bio-degradeable plastic was nothing more than a marketing sleight of hand: Essentially just micro plastic bound together with something biodegradeable like corn starch. The plastic still enters the environment, skips the part where it breaks down from large pieces to tiny ones, yet still contaminates the enviroment.
One - you are giving humans and plastic a lot of benefit of doubt. Time and again, it is demonstrated that human convenience trumps environmental concerns. So governments can have state-of-the-art recycling facilities but getting people to co-operate is an uphill challenge.
Second - the nature of plastic itself. You are basing sustainability on cost to environment in production but not taking into account the cost of disposal. The world is rapidly moving towards sustainable sources of energy and thus energy consumption is becoming less of a concern. Glass, cucumbers etc can be sustainably disposed off or recycled but plastic can't be - at least not all kinds currently in use/production.
And the cucumber example is a little disingenuous. A lot of the cucumber product is fast moving and fly off the shelves rapidly. Number of cucumbers being actually consumed is >>> than the number of cucumbers being spoiled. But the environment has to deal with sum total of all the plastic used to wrap the cucumber - even those which were consumed rapidly and would have not been spoiled at all.
>Second - the nature of plastic itself. You are basing sustainability on cost to environment in production but not taking into account the cost of disposal.
If you just burn the wrapper in your fireplace, it'll produce less than 6g of CO2. We're talking about the equivalent of half a teaspoon of gasoline. Growing and transporting a cucumber produces about 1kg of CO2. The wrapper is not the problem.
But we want the cucumber, and any leftover cucumber will decompose to nothing - it doesn't require any specialised waste processing. The 1kg of CO2 to grow and transport the cucumber is a spent cost, but half a teaspoon of gasoline for every single cucumber is an obscene environmental cost.
The same argument applies to your steak - the environmental cost of the steak is irrelevant, because the steak is the product we want, and again, leftover steak disappears without trace in very short order. The issue is the packaging, which we don't want but hangs around for half a millenia if disposed of irresponsibly.
The goal of this part of the initiative is to deal with that "last mile" problem of irresponsible waste processing, because we can't trust people to dispose of plastics properly. That will inevitably have a knock on effect on the rest of the supply chain, because now companies can't sell products which use single use plastics in that area, so they'll look at alternative ways of packaging their product.
That might result in some products having shorter shelf lives, but those products don't require complex waste management practices - they just move to different levels of the food chain.
The other environmental issues such as the transport cost are an entirely separate concern which aren't impacted by this move at all.
The environment is more than a single dimension. I'm not going to dispute your stats on individual items here--as far as CO2 goes, maybe you're right. But the oceans and landfills are filling up with non-biodegradable plastic garbage that is weakening ecosystems all over the planet. We need to get our waste pipeline under control at all stages, and plastic packaging is garbage for a long term plan. As evidence I cite every beach in the world. I'll take the spoiled cucumbers and milk; it's wasted energy, it contributes to ecological impact, but ultimately biodegradable.
Landfill waste doesn’t generally end up in the oceans. Landfills aren’t the problem, it’s the bad management of waste, typically by countries that care more about basic survival than the effect of their trash on a whale. A villager in rural China doesn’t typically have the luxury of caring as much as some Instagraming Brooklynite. Creating better processes around waste management is going to have a much larger and predicatable effect than outright bans — which can have unintended consequences that the “smart people” fail to predict. Blanket bans on DDT are a good example, sounded good, until millions more people died of malaria. (I am not suggesting we continue or end the DDT ban, it’s just an example of the effect of a policy that was driven by emotion rather than a rigorous scientific process.) It’s possible that banning plastic could have unforeseen consequences that haven’t been considered by the simpletons that typically are charged with making government policy.
> It's a net win, because the environmental impact of wasted cucumbers is far greater than the environmental impact of a gram or two of polyethylene wrapping.
Producing a cucumber results in CO2 emissions of about 1kg (3.3kg CO2 per kg product, avg weight ~300g). Shrink-wrapping a cucumber increases the average shelf life from 9 days to 15 days in refrigerated conditions and from 2 days to 5 days in ambient conditions.
Producing a kilogram of polyethylene film packaging emits about 2.7kg of CO2. The wrapping on an average-sized cucumber weighs about 2g, producing an additional 5.4g of CO2 emissions and increasing the total carbon footprint of the cucumber by ~0.54%. About 12% of cucumbers delivered to US retailers go unsold due to damage, spoilage or other loss.
While carbon emissions are an important consideration, they are not only impact of plastic. Plastics often end up in the ocean where they cause havoc with not just marine marine life, but also people.
It is not just about viewing unsightly plastic, but also ingestion of plastic and chemicals associated with plastic such as phthalates and endocrine disruptors. While spoilage is in issue, so are the various health problems associated with plastic. While there are too many unstudied plastic associated chemicals to quantify the impact, a number of them are clearly associated with cancer, obesity and infertility.
This month's issue of National Geographic is devoted to the problem of plastic in the ocean and is worth a look.
As brutal as it might seem, plastic pollution is not a high priority. It makes for some shocking and upsetting photos, but it's not a fundamental threat to the marine ecosystem. The sources of marine plastic pollution are non-obvious and can be mostly mitigated through better management of waste rather than elimination at source.
Ocean acidification due to rising CO2 levels is a cataclysmic threat to the marine ecosystem. A relatively small decrease in pH could lead to the extinction of many key invertebrate species and the complete collapse of some habitats.
The health risks posed by plastics are marginal at worst. There are some legitimate concerns about certain persistent organic pollutants, but plastics are not the primary sources of exposure to these compounds and their use is largely under effective control.
In Mumbai, it's a high enough priority to justify doing something about it. There may be bigger threats to the marine ecosystem, but this isn't a situation where relative privation is appropriate - this part is fixable, so why not fix it?
The problem with "better waste management" is it requires involvement on an individual level, and individuals can't be trusted to do it. Elimination at source removes the responsibility for the consumer and reduces the requirement for complex waste processing. That's a win for everybody.
It's unknown if wrapping cucumbers would reduce the % that goes to waste. It's also likely that the 12% of cucumbers that go to waste also include those that are shrink wrapped. Extending shelf life of produce won't matter too much, if customers are looking at the date which the produce was shrink wrapped and buying the 'freshest' wrapped cucumber.
The problem here is that if cucumbers are going to waste, retailers are not managing their inventory well. That means way too many cucumbers are being produced and sold to retailers. This is all in the name of profit, at the expense of the environment.
CO2 emissions are not the only environmental issue. While you may downplay the effect plastics have on the environment compared to CO2, it's still a problem nonetheless.
> the environmental impact of wasted cucumbers is far greater than the environmental impact of a gram or two of polyethylene wrapping.
You're comparing the transportation costs of cucumbers to the production costs of plastic wrap, this conflated comparison seems disingenuous to me.
It also needs to be qualified that whatever truth is in that statement only applies to cucumbers that went to the grocery store and weren't sold. It's not true for cucumbers that dry up in the field where they grew.
Fixing that problem has nothing to do with cucumbers and everything to do with making sales and transportation more efficient.
> The plastic wrapper produced ~10g of CO2 and required ~100ml of water to produce; the steak produced ~7kg of CO2 and required ~4,000 litres of water to produce.
I'm curious what water usage has to do with this? Water used to raise a cow gets to be used again, right?
> As long as it is disposed of responsibly, a whole trash bag full of plastic packaging has a negligible environmental impact compared to a single portion of beef.
Are you claiming that every kg of beef production releases more c02 than every kg of plastic production? How do you figure that?
>You're comparing the transportation costs of cucumbers to the production costs of plastic wrap, this conflated comparison seems disingenuous to me.
Cucumbers are wrapped in plastic to enhance their shelf life and reduce waste due to spoilage. If the environmental impact of the plastic is lower than the environmental impact of the cucumbers that would be lost due to spoilage, then it is a net environmental benefit. I have provided references to support this argument in another comment in this thread.
I'm curious what water usage has to do with this? Water used to raise a cow gets to be used again, right?
Water loops around endlessly through the water cycle, but clean water is a limited resource. The run-off water from cattle feedlots, grazing pastures or the fields used to grow cattle feed cannot be readily recaptured in a usable form; this run-off water will have polluting effects on aquatic life due to contamination with nitrates.
>Are you claiming that every kg of beef production releases more CO2 than every kg of plastic production? How do you figure that?
Yes. I found the figures in published reports. Producing a kilogram of polyethylene packaging film results in about 2.7kg of CO2 emissions, from refining the oil through to disposal. Producing a kilogram of beef results in about 39kg of CO2 equivalent emissions from farm to plate, made up partly from direct energy inputs and partly from the methane and nitrous oxide produced by the cattle, which are significantly more potent warming gases than CO2.
I understand your argument about the net c02 benefit of wrapping cucumbers in plastic. It doesn't mean plastic should be used or that it's good. You're not comparing the benefits of plastic wrap to the benefits of increased engine efficiency, or the c02 benefits of improved sales cycles or local agriculture vs global conglomerate food producers.
Drawing any conclusion from your c02 net benefit calculation assumes that we continue to do business exactly as we do today without improving, and ignores the possibility that there might be a point where there is no net benefit to wrapping cucumbers. The sources you provide elsewhere in this thread conclude that improving the processes involved in production of foods is where we should focus, not that we should wrap more things in plastic.
If we could sell 100% of cucumbers without wasting any cucumbers and without using plastic, that would be better than wrapping them in plastic, right? Unnecessary use of plastic is not good for the environment, right?
This cucumber thing feels like a sideshow distraction to sing the praises of plastic. Unnecessary single use water bottles are a massive global problem. Cucumbers, not nearly as much. There are legitimate uses of plastic, and I'd be happy accepting wrapping some veggies in exchange for getting rid of single serving plastic water bottles and the many other unnecessary uses of plastic that pervade.
> The run-off water from cattle feedlots, grazing pastures or the fields used to grow cattle feed cannot be readily recaptured in a usable form
Not immediately, but next year, right?
> this run-off water will have polluting effects on aquatic life due to contamination with nitrates.
You mention the pollution from agriculture but leave out the pollution from plastic production. Plastic production has immediately toxic pollutants, causing high rates of cancer to workers and nearby communities. Not to mention plastic waste itself being damaging pollution, with a lifespan far longer than nitrates.
>the c02 benefits of improved sales cycles or local agriculture vs global conglomerate food producers.
Do you have any data to support the notion that there is a net CO2 benefit to localizing agriculture? Considering how impacted agriculture is by locality, That seems vastly less efficient than large scale industrialized agriculture, and would be honestly quite surprising.
>Not to mention plastic waste itself being damaging pollution, with a lifespan far longer than nitrates.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the real issue isn't the consumers of Cucumbers, its developing countries and China[1] using their rivers and oceans for mass waste disposal.
> Do you have any data to support the notion that there is a net CO2 benefit to localizing agriculture? Considering how impacted agriculture is by locality, That seems vastly less efficient than large scale industrialized agriculture, and would be honestly quite surprising.
I pointed out that @jdietrich wasn't considering any of the many potential alternatives to wrapping produce in plastic, I didn't claim there's a net c02 benefit to local farms.
I don't think c02 emissions represent the sum total of "evironmental impact" as was implied multiple times above. c02 is important, but there are other important factors being ignored in this thread.
Implicit in your question is your assumption that large scale ag is more c02-efficient than local farming on the whole, which I would ask you to justify first. I don't know how to compare local farms to Conagra fairly, and I don't conduct c02 emissions research myself. But Conagra doesn't exist for efficiency, they exist to make money. Of course they value efficiency, but I would expect the scale of their operation adds more logistical problems to the food supply than it solves. They need to use far more transportation, refrigeration, processing and packaging than local food suppliers.
"Transportation of food accounts for about 11 percent of the GHG emissions from the food system."
"The energy used for refrigeration results in one of the main GHG effects from food production. Some products require constant refrigeration as soon as they leave the farm."
"Meat that is discarded in retail, industry and the home accounts for 20 percent of the total GHG emissions of meat production"
What do you mean when you say local ag "seems vastly less efficient"? Why? What efficiencies are there that offset the extra transportation, refrigeration, processing, and storage costs that global ag companies have over local farms?
Perhaps implicit or assumed in your point of view is the idea of growing the same produce locally that one would buy in the store, without changing consumption patterns at all? Is that what you meant by "considering how impacted agriculture is by locality"? I'm imagining some change in purchasing behavior and I recognize that growing bananas & coffee isn't possible everywhere.
>I don't think c02 emissions represent the sum total of "evironmental impact" as was implied multiple times above.
I completely agree. I'm also very reluctant to believe any report that estimates GHG emissions from industry, because I believe industry has a very real reason to misrepresent themselves in such reports. Whether that industry is growing and delivering tomatoes or LiPo Batteries.
>Conagra doesn't exist for efficiency, they exist to make money.
efficiency = money, i thought that was obvious. I'm a pretty strong believer in the power of markets.
>"Meat that is discarded in retail, industry and the home accounts for 20 percent of the total GHG emissions of meat production"
Not sure the relevance of that bit, how anyone can care about the environment and not be vegetarian is completely beyond me. I cringe everytime I go out to eat seeing how much meat gets tossed.
>Is that what you meant by "considering how impacted agriculture is by locality"?
Yes.
>I'm imagining some change in purchasing behavior
I'd call that fantasy. If we can't get people to drive fuel-efficient cars even with tax incentives, how are we going to get people to give up blueberries and pineapple in fruit salad? Especially considering how bad meat is, and how few are willing to give it up or even let those around them give it up--as being vegetarian for the last decade has taught me (/grandstand) The best thing we could do would be to create GMO versions of crops that need long distance transportation that either don't have the same environmental requirements to grow or are able to be transported without refrigeration, because the market isn't going to change. Regardless, we've got tens of millions living in the Desert South West, I don't foresee them all living on prickly pears.
> I'm also very reluctant to believe any report that estimates GHG emissions from industry
Same!
> efficiency = money, i thought that was obvious.
We have to be careful here. We've just switched to talking about overall production efficiency now, not the c02 byproduct efficiency that was being referred to. There is no t much of a direct market force to be efficient about c02 byproducts, in fact often the opposite, money and production efficiency is a force against reducing c02 emissions.
> how anyone can care about the environment and not be vegetarian is completely beyond me.
That's a great point. Not to mention Americans just eat too much. We could make huge improvements by eating less.
>> I'm imagining some change in purchasing behavior
> I'd call that fantasy.
That's a fair point, for as long as we have these options. A willing change in purchasing behavior might be unrealistic.
"A lot of people bemoan the plastic wrapping on cucumbers, but that wrapping doubles the shelf life of the product. It's a net win, because the environmental impact of wasted cucumbers is far greater than the environmental impact of a gram or two of polyethylene wrapping."
A gram or two, multiplied by millions of cucumbers and other food products wrapped in plastic. We produce more than we need to consume. Grocery stores are buying more produce and wasting more, and farmers are growing more.
CO2 emissions is a big problem, but so are plastics. Just because one produces more CO2 than the other doesn't mean we can't tackle both problems together. And the issue of plastics is not that of CO2.
Plastics are useful - I agree. However they are overused not for their usefulness, but for convenience. Produce doesn't need to be wrapped in plastic in grocery stores. Restaurants need not use plastics for takeout orders. Iced drinks don't need to be contained in plastic cups, nor do they require straws. Plastic bags are absolutely unnecessary, and there are other alternatives that work just as well.
That's all true, couple of years ago it made more sense to actually burn plastic waste, e.g. to use it to make steel than to recycle it. But the problem in India and China is that the plastic is dumped in the rivers and ends up in the food chain where we are all eating it later on. Steaks and glass bottles do no harm to the environment when just thrown away
Cucumbers do not spontaneously emerge from the ground in an untouched rural idyll and teleport themselves to your supermarket. Putting a cucumber on the shelf of your local supermarket produces about 1kg of CO2 emissions. Atmospheric CO2 isn't biodegradable.
Same response as prior... this article is about plastic waste clogging rivers not CO2. Yes, there are other problems that also need better solutions. Stop conflating different problems. I have news for you: they don't plastic wrap cucumbers to save on CO2.
EDIT: And, yes, I have tunnel vision on solving the problem presented in the article not some other problem. There is no price for carbon that is inducing agricultural producers to minimize it.
A single plantation of 1 ha of olive trees in super high-density mode uses around 1700 PE cups, 1700 PVC shoot protectors and 2,5 km of PVC drip irrigation tubes, not to mention the tying.
Melon production also directly uses plastic, albeit temporarily. Greenhouses need repair and maintenance.
Also worth of mention all the herbicide/fungicide/insecticide plastic containers. Only these last have an actual though-of destination for recycling, which is mandatory. These have to be washed and made unusable, to avoid accidents, which means forgetting about 2 out of 3 Rs in this case.
We can and should do better. What if we had a robot that would drive through the fields, detecting weeds and crushing or cutting them out instead of chemical solutions? Couldn't we deliver the water more directly as well?
Shouldn't transportation use battery powered vehicles instead of fossil fuel based vehicles?
Can't we steam wash with renewable energy?
Maybe it costs more to do some of these things now, but I think folks could use some good goals to work toward.
On a happy note "no-till" is starting to prove itself. There are mixtures of effectiveness and chemical usage but checkout the No Till vids the USDA is promoting https://www.youtube.com/user/TheUSDANRCS
> Things take much more energy to PRODUCE than to dispose of.
Right. Plastic takes a lot more energy to produce than cucumbers (and today a large portion of plastic production is non-renewable energy, compared to the solar that grows cucumbers). Plastic production also results in much more c02 byproduct than the production of cucumbers.
The 'evidence' against cucumbers above was to count the c02 byproduct of transporting the cucumbers, not how much c02 they give off while growing. The same applies to all the plastics in the grocery store too, they also have to be transported, so that argument is completely moot. If you want to reduce c02, it's irrelevant to pit veggies against plastic, we simply need to make vehicles more efficient. BTW, I'm not arguing against the paper; if you read the paper's abstract, that exactly the conclusion they come to as well. It seems like @jdietrich is either confused about what it's saying, or is trying to spin or cloud the issue.
If you remove the argument of transportation from the equation, plants are a net negative in c02 emissions. Plants absorb more c02 than they produce. The more plants we grow, the more c02 we save. Not so for plastic, which produces 3-6 kg of c02 per kg of plastic in the production of plastic alone, not counting the transportation.
> Agriculture is incredibly energy, land, and water intensive.
Right. So what? This sentence seems to completely misunderstand that using energy (the sun), land, and water to grow food is environmentally friendly because it's renewable. All the energy and land and water we use to grow plants we get to keep using over and over again with positive environmental benefits.
It's our man-made processes, especially the ones that burn fossil fuels, that are causing almost all the problems we have; cars, machines, plastic production, etc.. c02-wise, farm equipment is a small portion of that, transportation is a much large piece of the pie.
This is all well and good, in a country with clear garbage pickup schedules, where people put their plastic in their garbage bin, and a garbage truck comes to take it away into a landfill.
Unfortunately, in countries with plastic pollution problems, there are a large number of externalities that your essay did not account for. Or, more specifically one large externality - when people are done using it, they throw it out.
Until the garbage disposal situation gets resolved, it makes perfect sense to demonize and ban plastic. If you want plastic back, maybe this is an incentive to get garbage disposal fixed.
So that last 'graph got me wondering, and knowing that there are basically no plastics recycled where I live, I looked up if cling film, or polystyrene (a typical steak wrapping) could be recycled in Seatlle, and the answer is no.
In fact it looks like the answer is no most everywhere. And while cling film does degrade after decades, while polystyrene might take multiple 100,000s of years.
Which means the problem might be the steak if the wrapper is disposed responsibly, disposing responsibly is the real problem, and likely impossible.
What's irresponsible about just landfilling it after it has served its purpose? You're taking a small amount of oil that started off underground, and then isolating it back under ground.
The main problem appears to be with people who litter, and in areas that don't have a sanitation system to carry away and isolate garbage like this.
Recycling plastic is nice, but the point of GP's post is that even without it, it has the potential to massively reduce waste.
See if your grocery store's plastic bag recycling can take it.
Cling film can't be recycled with glass/plastic/paper because it ties up the machines, but here in upstate NY you can put it in with grocery bags, ziplocks, and other thin plastics at the in-store drop-off. We started doing this as well as a composting service and it's remarkable how much emptier our trash bin is now - half the volume, easily.
This exactly sums up the problem. It's no use being able to recycle everything if doing so requires everybody to sort their waste and take it to different places. Most people won't do that.
If we remove single use bags and cling film (yes, cling film is going to be a tough one), you're no longer reliant on the consumer to responsibly manage their waste.
There's a trade off. You're no longer sorting waste, and you're still generating less waste, but reduced shelf lives mean you now need to shop for fresh produce more often, potentially using more fuel and offsetting any gains. But you're no longer producing waste that takes centuries to decompose.
CO2 is having a far more severe impact on the oceans through acidification. All of the world's major coral reefs have experienced severe bleaching events; the IPCC has predicted the complete collapse of many reef ecosystems if CO2 emissions are not brought under control.
Why not figure out why plastic ends up in the ocean and solve that problem? Motor oil in the oceans is far more dangerous than plastics, but no sane person is advocating banning lubricants. Instead laws and practices were developed to ensure used oil doesn’t end up in storm drains and water supplies.
You can't compare CO2 and plastic wraps by weight, because the scale of the problem is very different.
According to Wikipedia, mankind emitted 33.5 Gt of CO2 in the year 2010, and the surface area of the Earth is 510072000 km^2. In other words, we add 66g of CO2 per every square meter of the Earth, every year.
Imagine an Earth where we add six ~10g plastic wraps per square meter, every year, in every corner of the world. It becomes clear that the reason plastic wraps are collectively a less serious problem is that there are much less of them in the first place, compared to CO2 emission.
In other words, you cannot just compare a single piece of plastic wrap with an equal mass of CO2 and claim they are equivalent. You're comparing apples and oranges.
It's hardly demonizing without a reason. Sounds almost like a "it's not the guns, it's the bad people" argument, but here plastics will continue to create problems most importantly in the form of microplastics, no matter how you regulate. We continue polluting our waters and the food we eat, and the longer we continue, the more difficult it will be to restore the situation, so we need drastic actions. On top of the obvious (see the related pictures), we have phtalates for example, that we don't know much about.
> A lot of people bemoan the plastic wrapping on cucumbers, but that wrapping doubles the shelf life of the product. It's a net win, because the environmental impact of wasted cucumbers is far greater than the environmental impact of a gram or two of polyethylene wrapping.
But that is endemic to our insane food system. I think plastic wrapped cucumbers aren’t worth having. If you can’t survive without literally destroying the environment, at least let other animals enjoy Earth.
If you only read one book on the subject, read Dr David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air. It clearly explains how we use energy, how we produce it and how we can sustainably match supply and demand. It gave me an intuitive understanding of energy, using quick order-of-magnitude calculations to figure out the really important issues. It's written from a British perspective, but the principles are universally applicable. Best of all, it's completely free to read online.
I'd also highly recommend Factfulness by Hans Rosling. It reveals that most Westerners have a grossly distorted and irrationally pessimistic image of the world. It's not really about energy or environmentalism, but it fills a vital gap in our common understanding of the future - the immense, unstoppable rise of the global middle-class. Once you internalise the idea that there is no great divide between the "first world" and the "third world", everything else looks very different. A majority of the world's population are neither very poor nor very rich, which presents a completely different set of challenges with respect to sustainable energy and climate change.
My other recommendation would be to make good use of Google Scholar and SciHub. A large proportion "debates" I see aren't really debates at all, because the key points being argued are incorrect or irrelevant. Scientific research doesn't necessarily give us answers, but it can stop us from arguing over stupid questions.
Plastic is good. Your (Govt's) inability to recycle plastic is the issue. No! the govt is going to blame someone and something else for its failures :sigh:
Imposing a ban on "public" and practically making sure that it is followed by the huge population of India is really difficult. We have seen such bans imposed on public before, and none of them were successful till the date.
On the other hand, keeping an eye on the handful of (big) companies to restrict them from supplying plastic to people is comparatively an easy task and requires less (man, money and infrastructure) power.
Besides, government(s) can also think of funding research program(s) to synthesize an eco-friendly material alternative to plastic which can be produced with same cost as of plastic; or funding program(s) to at least efficiently recycle plastic directly proportional to its growing usage.
I remember that in Germany you can buy bags made from corn starch, but they're very thin and very fragile. You need to be really lucky to bring home your shopping bags safely and you definitely cannot reuse them. But you can put them on the compost, which is really cool! If they work on making it a little more robust, bags like that would be my first choice
Producing a paper bag has environmental impacts equivalent to three lightweight polyethythene bags. For cotton bags, it's about a 130x multiple. The best option is to reuse a thick nonwoven plastic bag until it's worn out; woven plastic or cotton bags are rarely re-used often enough to repay their greater costs of manufacture.
for some things sure e.g. Italy has had mandatory biodegradable shopping bags for a few years, but for other things, like coke bottles, it seems harder.
I mean, you can enforce glass bottles but that does not seem like a major improvement.
plastic bottles can be recycled, but the problem, as I understood it, is thrash not being handled properly, so the fact that you have plastic bottles in rivers or shard of glass bottles does not change much.
It's tricky to bribe out of the situation especially if your product is being sold out there in the open. Your competition will tell on you or your consumers will notice.
I live in the Philippines. The trash you see everywhere, in the streets and in the rivers is plastic bags and bottles. It sees that packaging actually makes its way to the dump.
Plastic is sometimes useful to preserve fresh food to some degree. Without plastic many goods wouldn’t be viable. Would be nice though if at least the necessary plastic was highly recycleable, as well as cost efficient etc.
There are grocery stores (like Sprouts in my area) that sell fresh food like produce that aren't packed in plastic. They're all loose items that you just pick up and put into your own bag (which hopefully is either plastic that you reuse, or just a cloth bag). Then there are some grocery stores that pack most of their produce like vegetables all in plastic. If no plastic works for one, I don't see how it's necessary for the other.
Go to a butcher and get it in paper. Make your own mayo...it's an egg, veg oil, and a little salt and pepper...store in glass. Salad dressing...store in glass. Metal tops. Pretty much the packaging up until the 70's.
Wouldn't that create fragmentation in production, therefore possibly significant price increases due to the need of retooling of packaging and distribution?
Such measures work when done in the rich world with very large markets, for example, companies increase their standards due to EU regulations because they find that it's cheaper to retool themselves according to the EU and sell everywhere even if EU standards are not imposed everywhere, instead of maintaining two standards or losing the EU market altogether.
"Almost 50% plastic come directly from such consumer products sold by all FMCG companies. Such plastic material which is used as a wrapper (e.g. mineral bottles, wrappers of chocolates, biscuits, wafers, tobacco, etc.) is often useless and people tend to throw it right away."
I don't think this is going away until cities and states and government start doing something about this. Plastic bag banning is great, but it doesn't solve the entire equation. Plastic wrapping is just too convenient and preserves the lifetime of the product better than, say, paper. The transluscency of plastics also make it ideal for packaging food like meat, sushi, iced drinks, bread etc where being able to see the product is important. It also keeps in liquids nicely.
Someone needs to come up with an alternative to plastic that's biodegradable while still keeping plastic's properties that make it useful for packaging. I think that's going to be a huge industry. Landfills in my city are filling up and we're resorting to shipping some out to other cities. People like their plastic but yet complain when the city garbage rates go up every year.
You can already buy bags made from plant material (tuber and tapioca is popular). The fact that they are 3x the price and less durable than petroleum-based bags is probably because they have seen less research and mass production. This can change. I use them to chuck out the cat litter.
Probably the next move is banning all FMCG. We got used to the garbage such as soap, tooth paste etc. But I think we will be fine if they are not available.
> is often useless and people tend to throw it right away.
It's not useless per se. Packaging makes things look bigger on shelves and it gives a better perception of value for certain items (or makes them more visible on shelves). The good thing is that is going to become less and less relevant as we move more and more towards online shopping - I hope that at some point we just get a white box when its shipped directly from a warehouse.
I agree that "we", the people need to take a pledge to stop using plastic as much as we can. But if there's no restriction put on giant FMCG companies such as Hindustan Unilever, ITC, Patanjali, Netsle, Procter and Gamble, etc. from supplying their products wrapped in plastic, I consider all of these government initiatives merely as a gimmick.
EDIT 1: Another comment I left on this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17400028.
EDIT 2: In India, plastic is a major contributor of blocking sewers and rivers, especially in rainy seasons. Another important problem plastic waste produces is that since government bodies (such as, municipal corporations, gram panchayats, etc.) are unable to dump and/or recycle plastic waste properly, it is accidentally consumed by animals and is the major reason for their deaths. Another issue is that, often "dumping waste" is considered as "burning" it. Burning plastic waste disturbs healthy air and is a major factor among others responsible for the increased air pollution in Indian cities recently.