Reduce, Reuse and Recycle

The following is an article I wrote for a Newsletter on Plastic Free India.

Plastic is derived from the Greek word plastos which means something that can be shaped or molded into any form as is deemed necessary. Possessing such a great property, Plastic has certainly been put to use in far too many industries and to list them in itself would be time and space consuming. The way in which plastic has permeated and percolated into our daily lives, it would indeed be extremely difficult to shake ourselves away from it. This being the case, the possibility of a Plastic Free India is just a Utopian thought, something which is soothing to hear and to dream about but absolutely impossible to achieve. My understanding of a Plastic Free India would be an India where we try our best to stop the use of those plastics which are disposed off after a single use. Having said that, it would be indeed difficult to use a disposable syringe over and over again and the same would hold true for all the single use plastic products that are used in an operation theatre.
As a lay person I can think of two products that we can cease to use. By doing so we would indeed be helping our environment and making our city a better place to live in. These are the widely used ultra thin plastic shopping bags and the even more widely used packaged drinking water bottles. Coming to think of it, the use of these two products in India began around thirty years ago. The bags were considered the in thing and right from the big departmental stores to the small corner shop to the street vendors took to it like fish to water. It was considered chic and easy to carry and thus the age old cloth shopping bags were relegated to the back or totally forgotten. The fall out of this idiocy combined with the poor literacy rate helped create a catastrophe. Thus we used the thin bags and threw them into our trash which was then collected and thrown into dumps were they have been lying for the last thirty years. Had the plastic been biodegradable, with the help of the sun, most of it may have broken down and mixed with the soil. The same holds true for the packaged water bottle, which when it was first introduced was considered fashionable. I guess we have ourselves to blame, for if we had taken care to see that our water bodies were safe and if we were able to provide good drinking water to the masses, the question of a packaged water industry would never ever have risen. Now to make matters worse, the poor disposal of plastic has led to the clogging of most of the smaller streams and canals. Thus we can take a pledge that we would go back to our cloth bags and glass/steel water bottles.
A Plastic Free India would be one in which we are bereft of most things that we are used to and take for granted. Having reached the second decade of the 21st Century, are we ready to go back to that era of the 19th Century when plastic was not discovered?? As I mentioned earlier, let us be practical and let us do everything to lessen its usage and to learn to make do without it wherever possible. As citizens of this country, let our mantra be to REDUCE, REUSE AND RECYCLE.