What’s common between - Drinking water bottles, tooth paste tubes, combs, CD ROM Discs, cups, fashionable decorations and certain food packaging materials?
You guessed it. All these items contain plastic in some form or the other. While, their usefulness has been exploited by mankind to the fullest, I doubt if anyone can understand the strain it is putting our environment under.
Just like any other thing in life we usually don’t realize that we have a potential problem on hand until we actually see it bothering our life.
I am sure all of you know that plastic is harmful for the environment. But how is it exactly harmful? Let’s get down to very specific points.
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Plastics contain a variety of toxic additives. Vinyl chloride, the major component in PVC is a known cancer causing substance.
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Water bottles which are so commonly used by almost every person, releases toxic chemicals that comes back to harm us directly.
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Plastics that we throw away, when burnt, release toxic fumes which are inhaled by us, and damage our health.
I feel, the problem is we don’t actually SEE this happening and that’s why we don’t take any action to change our dependency on this substance. For example, you don’t actually SEE any chemical getting into your water in the plastic bottle. You don’t actually SEE vinyl chloride entering our body to cause cancer. We just realize we have cancer some day. We don’t actually SEE the air that we inhale has some content of plastic fumes.
The obvious question that comes up now is: “Well, I know plastic is bad. But what do I do? I go to the market and what ever I want to buy is plastic made. So, even though I know its harmful effects, I can’t stop my favourite Cola company from selling its product in plastic bottles, or water in plastic bottles.”
his is our basic problem. Remember, if we ourselves aren’t interested in remaining healthy, who is?
I feel a few basic steps taken proactively from our end; when collectively implemented can go a long way in reducing our usage of plastic.
Wherever possible, do not use plastic at all. For example, a majority of plastic bags are collected by us, while buying vegetables. It is not needed to take different plastic bags for each vegetable. Cloth bags work just as fine. Remember, its just a little bit of an investment that is needed.
Use re-cycled plastic wherever possible. All recycled plastic have the following symbol printed on it.
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If you are using a plastic bag, use that piece all the time for all activities. If you buy some vegetables take that same bag along with you and don’t accept a new bag from the vendor.
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Use glass/metallic water bottles for storing water at your homes rather than plastic bottles.
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Do not use plastic furniture at home. While, it may be priced cheaply, it certainly doesn’t add to the decorum of your living room and is easily breakable.
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While organizing a party, use paper glasses and cups instead of plastic ones.
And the list goes on..
Do try and come up with some new and innovative ways of using lesser plastic.
I want to re-iterate that these measures will in no way eliminate the use of plastic. It will only bring down the amount of it used and this number will only be significant if it is done on a large-scale.
A complete elimination can only be enforced by some higher agency like the government which can enforce laws to control excess plastic use or provide some incentives to citizens who use lesser plastic.
The government can also allocate money for setting up plastic degradable enhancing materials at landfills and garbage dumps.
