Twenty-six year old Rajat Rai Handa reels through the streets of New Delhi, India’s capital, in searing 40° Celsius midday heat. “The pledge tree is confirmed. We need to figure out any way to stick the pledges on the tree that doesn’t involve plastic!”
Things are busy. Rai Handa is simultaneously giving instructions to his driver and the team in the back of the car, all while talking to someone else on the phone and nursing a broken arm. As Advocacy and Communications Manager at Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, Handa and his team are gearing up to celebrate World Environment Day on 5 June.
On 4 June, their “last straw” campaign, #patheticplastics, in collaboration with a major shopping mall, aims to phase out single-use plastics in the food court, starting with plastic straws. Select CITYWALK mall, a popular high-end mall with an average footfall of 50,000 people a day, is among the more environmentally conscious shopping centres in the city.
Rai Handa explains: “We know it’s not fair to ask low-end restaurants and markets to give up plastic straws immediately, because the alternatives are not yet as available or affordable. But we see no reason at all why high-end restaurants can’t use alternatives. They have to set an example and this is where we have to start raising awareness.”
The campaign will feature posters about what plastics are doing to the environment. There will be a plastics collection point, where potted plants can be swapped for plastic items from home, and a pledge tree – right now receiving the finishing touches – where people can commit to breaking up with plastic items.
Rai Handa is working hard to make a difference. He was behind India’s movement to reduce the Goods and Services Tax on plastic waste from 18 per cent to 5 per cent in 2017. “Recycling became more expensive than buying new items,” he explains. “When we managed to get the tax reduced, we were so shocked that we didn’t have to protest anymore!”
The wide highway gives way to narrow roads filled with tuktuks and cars. A mountain of sand rises above a dusty horizon. On closer inspection, the sand is waste: it masks skeletons of thousands of cartons, shoes and bags, towering above cloth and metal makeshift houses.
This is Bhalswa, northwest Delhi’s largest landfill site. At 60 feet, it covers a surface area of 25 football pitches. Delhi generates around 9,000 metric tonnes of waste every day; of that, around 2,700 metric tonns ends up here.
Here lies the reasons for the campaign to ban plastic goods. “These are the most marginalized communities,” he explains. Waste-picking communities work in hazardous health conditions with little support, picking out waste to send manufactures for a fee. They do it because it’s the only income-generating opportunity on their doorstep.
Handa leads the way down a small alley between the mounds of waste at the foot of the landfill mountain. A dark liquid seeps through heaps of waste, spilling into a small black stream. Amid smaller houses lined along the alley sits a brick house.
Here 19-year-old Sanwar Din, a leader in the waste picking community, lives with his mother, President of the Safai Sena community-led waste picker group for this area. When he was studying to be an engineer, Din’s father had a heart attack, so he moved to Delhi to help his mother run the family business.
Din is on his lunch break from a ten-hour shift. He usually finishes his day around 10pm, his team having sorted 500 kilograms of plastic per day, earning $5. Lighter plastics like bags go for around 15 cents; heavier plastics like oil cans go for around 60 cents per kilo.
The margins are small, but here at least, if you work hard, you are guaranteed to make money, he says. His mother and father arrived here 16 years ago with nothing. Today, their brick house stands larger than the others and is testament to their hard work.
Yet waste picking comes at a human cost. Dust, menstrual waste and toxic chemicals must be sorted through every day, with serious health consequences. Chintan group supports these communities by helping them access services like bank accounts and health care.
Turning “scavengers to managers” is part of what Rai Handa and his colleagues at Chintan aim to achieve. But raising awareness among middle and upper classes about where the waste they use ends up is crucial.
Chitra Mukherjee, head of programmes at Chintan, explains that consuming less is key. “I was in Goa recently and got not one but two straws in my drink. If you are in a country where the manufacturing is happening then there is a huge lobby in the manufacturing industry. We are catching all the wrong people – the small people on the road, the vendors. We are not getting the big guys.”
That’s where drives like #patheticplastics can bring awareness among consumers, and change habits among retail outlets and plastic suppliers, to limit the waste that ends up in landfull sites like Bhalswa. Until then, Sanwar Din and his waste picking community know that there won’t be a last straw – at least not until the one is manufactured.
This article was originally published by Young Champions of the Earth.
#BeatPlasticPollution is the theme of World Environment Day 2018. India is this year's host.
