The writer is a solicitor and works at a law firm
As a step towards curbing plastic pollution, State Minister for Climate Change Zartaj Gul has announced a blanket ban on the sale and purchase of polythene shopping bags in different cities of Pakistan effective August 14 onwards. Biodegradable shopping bags are being introduced as an alternative which begs the question as to how long before we will actually see implementation of this ban.
Attempts to outlaw these menacing plastic bags have also been made in the past. The Sindh government had imposed a ban on the manufacturing, sale, purchase, and use of polythene bags in 1994. Punjab followed suit in 1995 while Balochistan levied a complete ban on polythene bags in 2001. The federal capital also banned the use and sale of plastic bags in 2013 but all their efforts were in vain. Manufacturing industries continue to operate illegally and sadly not much has been done to remedy the situation.
About 80 per cent of total litter and more than 80 per cent of drain blockages in Pakistan are caused by these bags. Burning of plastic bags further adds to pollution in the air in the form of dioxins and furans. Plastic bags are also a breeding home for mosquitoes which cause malaria and dengue. Polythene bags have a surprisingly significant environmental impact for something so seemingly innocuous. These bags do not readily break down in the environment, requiring 20 to 1,000 years to decompose. One of the perturbing facts stemming from this is that plastic bags kill the wild and marine life. Once a dead animal (due to ingestion of a polythene bag) decomposes into the ground, the bag is released back into the environment more or less intact.
According to a survey, as many as 12 million plastic bags were used in Pakistan between 1990 and 1991 and this use rose to 43 billion in 2005 and up to 55 billion in 2007. Data collected by the Ministry of Climate Change confirms that the use of plastic bags is rising at the rate of 15 per cent annually. The latest report by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) states that the worldwide consumption of these polythene bags amounts to five trillion out of which an estimated thirteen million tons of bags are deposited into the sea.
There are at least 8,021 plastic bag production units in the country with the average daily production capacity of these units ranging between 250kg and 500 kg. An estimated 160,000 people in the country are directly and 600,000 people are indirectly dependent on the polythene bag business. With such a large-scale industry, a complete ban on manufacturing and use of plastic bags needs to be supplemented by additional measures such as increasing prices of the bags by levying additional taxes, promoting use of paper and cotton bags, increasing thickness of the bags to 30 microns and making biodegradable plastic bags readily available that decompose within three months.
Pakistan boasts of some of the world’s highest concentration of non-recyclable waste. Karachi’s bustling metropolis alone generates more than 9,000 tons of municipal waste on a daily basis. Imposing a blanket ban on the use of polythene bags will be but a drop in the ocean as far as our contribution to pollution is concerned. However, the implications will be felt far and wide and will ultimately help contribute towards creating a more sustainable ecological footprint.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 14th, 2019.
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