Down To Earth is a fortnightly magazine focusing on politics of environment and development, published in New Delhi, India.
UPSC Previous years’ questions on Development, Environment, Health and Disaster Management give us a clear idea about the increased importance of DTE magazine.
DTE Magazine is one of the most important and indispensable source for UPSC Civil Services Exam Preparation. Keeping this in mind, here, we come with ”Gist Of Down To Earth Magazine” which covers important environmental current affairs articles in smooth pointed form, keeping in mind the demand of UPSC aspirants.
The ban on carry bags is not novel. As many as 25 states and Union Territories have already banned them, as per the latest report of the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). The states say it is difficult to regulate this item based on plastic thickness. But we know that the enforcement is inadequate. This is why implementation of the new ban will make or break India’s fight against plastic waste.
The current list of banned items is not comprehensive. One can argue that if the aim is to get rid of the items that are difficult to collect or are single-use, then this list should have included multi-layered packaging. This is what is used in almost all fast-moving consumer goods— from chips to shampoos to gutka pouches. This is the real menace when it comes to plastic contamination because these items are almost impossible to collect and absolutely impossible to process.
The only thing that can be done with this packaging material is to send it to cement plants for incineration. This is why the few studies—mostly done by cpcb—on the characteristics of plastic found in landfill sites show up this single-use plastic.
All packaging material has been included as part of the extended producer responsibility (EPR) notification.Under this, the companies that manufacture or consume this material are required to take it back and send it for reprocessing. Even company wise annual targets have been fixed on how much is to be recollected. This sounds good on paper, but there are huge problems in the way epr has been designed or is being implemented. For instance, there is no information on the quantity of this plastic material or the waste the company generates. Not only is it based on self-declaration, but there is nothing available in the public domain to assess its accuracy. This means the target that has been set for each company is meaningless. There is no benchmark on which it can be said to be adequate. Worse, under epr, companies are required to recycle or reprocess the material they collect only by 2024.
Millions of poor people working in the informal sector who manage to make value out of our refuse. They are the real waste warriors. It is time we understood this so that we become responsible for our own waste and not use the banned items today, and ask for more to be banned tomorrow—because we must and can live without them.
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