Refuse what you don’t need !!!
Hi everyone, here I am with my new blog. In my earlier post, I gave a small introduction of Zero waste lifestyle and talked about the basic 5Rs of Zero waste lifestyle. In this blog, I am going to talk about the first of 5 Rs in a bit more detail. So, lets start with the first one.
Refusing is all about saying no to what is actually not required. Lesser incoming stuff will eventually result in lesser outgoing garbage. One should refuse to using any single use plastic or disposable plastic. A perfect example of such an item is - Plastic Straw. Plastic straw is more for convenience then the actual need. It is actually not required if the glass itself can be used to drink. While with time, usage of plastic straws have gone down and paper straws are being tried in some places, there are still lot of people out there who use plastic straws every day. More straws means more garbage which ends up in the landfill. Apart from plastic straws, there are lot of single use plastics like polythene, plastic spoons, plastic forks, plastic food packaging, garbage bags and the list goes on. Basically, any plastic, which can’t be used more than once and requires to be disposed just after using it is termed to be Single use plastic.
Single use or disposable plastic is usually a very low quality plastic to reduce the average production cost so that they can be used in day to day lives of the people. In general, plastic take a long time to decompose and when they decompose, harmful chemicals are released in the atmosphere which pollutes both land and nearby environment. With unrestricted usage of single use plastic, pollution increases continuously because of decompostion of such low quality plastic which is more harmful. By restricting or saying no to single use plastic, we are in a way bringing down the consumption of such plastic.
Consider an hypothetical example of plastic straws. Average weight of each plastic straw is 42 grams. A company, say of 100 employees, provides some juice/drink to their employees every day and if every employee uses 1 plastic straw everyday, he or she will end up generating a waste of 1.26kg per month just from plastic straws, forget about other garbage. For 100 employees, the plastic straw waste will be whopping 126 kg per month. Most of this plastic straw waste is not recyclable. Eventually this plastic garbage occupies some landfill which take years to decompose later.
So one should try to reduce the usage of single use plastic as much as possible. Over a period of time people have understood the harmful effects of single use plastics and have done their bit to reduce the plastic. Here are few major initiatives which have been taken by different stakeholders.
1. Government of India plans to ban single use plastic in few years. Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, called on global leaders to take steps in this direction considering the climate change crisis.
2. Amazon and Flipkart also pledged to ban single use plastic in India. Both the e-commerce giants use lot of single use plastic in packaging their products. Banning the usage of single plastic though will result in lesser profits for them but inspite of that they are taking such a crucial step to protect the environment : click here to know more.
3. Corner house, one of the famous ice cream parlour, started a "bring your own bowl" initiative to avoid plastic usage - click here to know more.
Cool !! Good thought!!!
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