Recently , The Mokokchung district administration, Nagaland exercised a complete ban on Packaged Drinking Water Bottles below 1 ltr. Many states have experimented this in past or even in present.
What may be the general strategy ?
The admin must have implemented this to reduce the number of bottles with smaller denomination, indirectly reducing the total plastic. Looks right, at the face of it. Let's verify, whether it really serves the purpose.
- It acts as a breakdown measure, something done to temporarily address the situation, not attacking the cause.
- The cause is the habit of littering. Is something done to educate people on this aspect parallelly ?
- There should be a drive to promote reverse vending machine usage at public places. This educates & rewards people more.
- For recycling, some special "Feel Good" drive should be implemented by the govt. This will encourage citizens to recycle the plastic PET bottles.
- As it is, almost 90 per cent of PET is recycled. There is no much point to include smaller bottles in the ban. This decreases the convenience of travelers and increases the usage of bigger sized bottles which provokes wastage of water ultimately.
In general, the policy looks good, however, the recycling should be more emphasized in parallel.
You are absolutely right sir, our govt. should start educating the mankind about recycling the plastic and preserving the drinking water. Banning small plastic bottles will definitely disrupt the travelers comfort.
ReplyDeleteHowever, on the other hand we are awaiting for our technology to come up with an alternative to plastic which should be easy to handle & carry viz., like some tetrapack or paperbag or some organic produce to store water.
(Glass bottles are not so easy to handle and carry).