Plastic choking Peshawar’s drainage system

Residents of the city have not shown any interest in using recyclable materials

PESHAWAR:

While most of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s (K-P) capital stayed safe from the onslaught of the torrential rains, some areas suffered due to a glaring plastic problem which choked the city’s drainage system.

The recent monsoon flooding did not affect Peshawar as it did Swat, Nowshera, and Charsadda but it exposed the city’s reliance on plastic and the residents’ lack of sensitization to how harmful plastic is to drainage systems. Noreen, a student in the Chamkani area of the provincial capital, where drains were flooded due to the rain, said that her village uses plastic heavily.

“Everywhere you see there are huge piles of garbage full of bags, wrappers, and cartons which eventually end up in the drains,” she informed this correspondent, “however, there is no garbage collection nor do the municipal corporation teams come into rural areas of Peshawar to clean.” The grade 9 student said that she along with her school fellows had tried multiple times to create awareness regarding plastic usage but to no avail. “Since the municipal corporation does not pay heed to rural areas, those who live here think plastic usage is okay.” Similarly, Parvez, who lives in the Rano Garhi village of Peshawar, said that there was a time when the canals surrounding their area used to be clean but are now full of plastic, especially bags.

“Back in the old days everyone used to have cloth bags and reusable materials but now the vegetables, milk, monthly groceries, and everything else comes in plastic bags.” Parvez, like Noreen, pointed out that due to a lack of awareness all the plastic then ends up in the village’s canals and drains which flood whenever there is heavy rainfall. On the other hand, environmental activist Sara Hayat, believes that plastic is not a rural area problem but the entirety of K-P suffers from it. Hayat opined that the provincial government has not paid any heed to the province’s plastic problem and would only realise the gravity of the situation later on.

Presently, as per government sources, the K-P government has completed legislation regarding the ban on use of plastic shopping bags, under which the plastic factories across the province will be stopped from manufacturing shopping bags and will be bound to manufacture recyclable bags. However, according to a report of the Provincial Management and Reforms unit, a campaign against plastic shopping bags has been going on for two years in K-P and about a 100 factories were sealed in Peshawar, Mardan and other districts of the province but most have reopened after getting stay orders from the courts.Spokesperson of Water and Sanitation Company in Peshawar, Hasan Khan, when asked about the province’s plastic problem, said that the government spends millions of rupees every year but the residents do not cooperate.

“Every year we clean drains and canals of plastic but the citizens keep on depending on plastic. If they cooperated with us then we could reduce the plastic pollution to a great extent,” Khan told The Express Tribune.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 21^st, 2022.