HYDERABAD: A report released recently in the United Kingdom, providing insight into the percentage of packaging plastic used by some leading supermarkets there, has caught everyone’s attention in that country. While a similar report is unavailable for the supermarkets in India or Hyderabad, one can just visit one nearest to their residence and observe for themselves that most of the plastic used for packaging fruits, vegetables and groceries is of poor quality, less than the legally-mandated 50 microns in thickness. Not just this, the supermarkets — national brands as well as the local ones — are promoting the use of single-use plastics among the public as their numbers keep mushrooming in the city. Most of the supermarkets offer plastic bags free of cost to customers for packaging commodities such as vegetables.
The old tradition of carrying a bag from home for carrying all the vegetables has become a tradition of the bygone era as customers in supermarkets now get a plastic bag for each vegetable or fruit, and on top of it, they end up buying a large plastic bag to keep all the other plastic bags holding their commodities.
Not being recycled
Although plastic bags sold or offered for free by supermarkets are usually of the mandated 50 micron thickness, it may be mentioned that such plastics often end-up choking the environment in landfills. As it was reported earlier, solid waste collected from homes in Hyderabad is taken to Jawaharnagar landfill outside the city. Here, ragpickers sell the waste to waste management units. As single use plastic like carry bags — those measuring even above 50 microns — do not provide much monetary value and are also hard to be separated from heap of waste, the rag-pickers collect only high density plastic goods and the plastic carry bags are left lying in the land fill.
City-based environmentalist Dr K Purushottam Reddy has this to say: “The issue of single-use plastics has to be weeded out from the root. The government should shut down all the single-use plastic manufacturing units in the State and similar move should be taken up at the national-level but political will is required for it. Just passing rules prohibiting plastic carry bags based on their thickness will prove of no use, as single-use plastics, regardless of their thickness, need to be banned.”